“Una nación bajo Diós, indivisible, con libertad y justicia para todos.”

When Jennifer López shouted out that last line of the Pledge of Allegiance in Spanish during Joe Biden’s inauguration ceremony, like so many Spanish-speaking Latinos in the United States I felt a sense of pride, a sense of arrival.  It was a joy to hear my native language given a prominent place at a moment when the need to pursue the promise of “liberty and justice for all” couldn’t be more pressing.

A sense of arrival, I say, and yet Spanish arrived on these shores more than a century before English. In that language, the first Europeans explorers described what they called “el Nuevo Mundo,” the New World — new for them, even if not for the indigenous peoples who had inhabited those lands for millennia, only to be despoiled by the invaders from abroad. The conquistadors lost no time in claiming their territories as possessions of the Spanish crown and, simultaneously, began naming them.

Much as we may now deplore those colonial depredations, we still regularly use the words they left behind without considering their origins. Florida, which derives from flor, flower in Spanish, because Ponce de León first alighted in Tampa Bay on an Easter Sunday (Pascua Florida) in 1513. And then there is Santa Fe (Holy Faith) and Los Angeles (the Angels), founded in 1610 and 1782 respectively, and so many other names that we now take for granted: Montana (from montañas), Nevada (from nieve, or snow), Agua Dulce, El Paso, and Colorado, to name just a few. And my favorite place name of all, California, which comes from a legendary island featured in one of the books of chivalry that drove Don Quixote, the character created by Miguel de Cervantes, mad and set him on the road to seek justice for all.

It was not justice, not justicia para todos, however, that the millions who kept Spanish alive over the centuries were to encounter in the United States. On the contrary, what started here as an imperial language ended up vilified and marginalized as vast swaths of the lands inhabited by Spanish speakers came under the sway of Washington. As Greg Grandin has documented in his seminal book, The End of a Myth, the expansion of the United States, mainly into a West and a Southwest once governed by Mexico, led to unremitting discrimination and atrocities.

It was in Spanish that the victims experienced those crimes: the girls and women who were raped, the men who were lynched by vigilantes, the families that were separated, the workers who were deported, the children who were forbidden to speak their native tongue, the millions discriminated against, mocked, and despised, all suffering such abuses in Spanish, while holding onto the language tenaciously, and passing it on to new generations, constantly renewed by migrants from Latin America.

Through it all, the language evolved with the people who used it to love and remember, fight and dream. In the process, they created a rich literature and a vibrant tradition of perseverance and struggle. As a result, from that suppressed dimension of American history and resistance, Spanish is today able to offer up words that can help us survive this time of pandemic.

That’s what I’ve discovered as I navigated the many pestilences ravaging our lives in the last year: the Spanish I’ve carried with me since my birth has lessons of hope and inspiration, even for my fellow citizens who are not among the 53 million who speak it.

Words of aliento for our current struggle Aliento tops the list of Spanish words that have recently mattered most to me. It means breath, but also encouragement. Alentar is to give someone the chance to breathe, to hearten them. (Think, in English, of the word encourage, which comes from the same root as corazón, heart, in Spanish.)

It’s worth remembering this connection today, when so many are dying because they lack breath and not even a ventilator can save them. Because they don’t have aliento, their heart stops. Perhaps they can’t breathe because others didn’t have the courage, el coraje, to help them survive, didn’t rage against the conditions that allowed them to die unnecessarily. Recall as well that so many of us in this country felt suffocated in another sense, breathless with the fear that we wouldn’t survive as a republic, not as a democracy, however imperfect it might have been.

Maybe that’s why, last year, so many Americans felt represented by the next to last words of George Floyd, repeated more than 20 times before he died: “I can’t breathe.” If he had cried out those words in Spanish, he would not have gasped, “No tengo aliento,” though that would have been true. He would undoubtedly have said: “No puedo respirar.”

Respirar. English speakers use the verb “to breathe,” but can certainly appreciate the various echoes respirar has in English, since it’s derived from the same word in Latin, “spirare,” that has bequeathed us spirit, inspire, and aspire. When we inhale and exhale in Spanish, I like to think that we’re simultaneously in communion with the sort of spirit that keeps us alive when the going is rough.

In normal times, the sharing of air is a reminder that we’re all brothers and sisters, part of the same humanity, invariably inhaling and exhaling one another, letting so many others into our lungs and vice versa. But these times are far from normal and the air sent our way by strangers or even loved ones can be toxic, can lead to us expiring. So rather than respirar together in 2021, we need to inspirar each other, to aspirar together for something better. We need to band together in a conspiracy of hope so that every one of us on the planet will be granted the right to breathe, so that good things can transpire.

As so many of the initial measures of the Biden-Harris presidency suggest, to begin to undo the venomous divisiveness of the Trump era, we all need to tomar aliento or breathe in new ways to survive.  We need to have more vida juntos or life with one another in order to go beyond the masked solitude of this moment, este momento de soledad.

Here comes the sun, but let it be for all As soledad originates from that same word, solitude, it undoubtedly will sound familiar to English speakers. But the Spanish syllables of soledad radiate with the word sol, the sun, that antidote to loneliness and separation, which rises for all or will rise for none, which warms us all or fries us all or heals us all. And soledad also contains the suffix dad (from the verb dar, to give), telling us again that the way out of isolation is to be as generous as sunlight to one another, especially to those who have more edad; who, that is, are older and therefore at greater risk. To be that generoso is not easy. It may take a lot of work to care for those in need when one is also facing grief and hardship oneself — a labor that is frequently difficult and painful, as the Spanish word for work, trabajo, reminds us.

Trabajo is not just physical labor or exertion. It brings to mind something more distressing. The last novel that Cervantes wrote after finishing Don Quixote was called Los Trabajos de Persiles y Segismunda and there trabajos refers to the torments and trials that two lovers go through before they can be unidos, united.

Think of trabajos as akin to travails in English and, indeed, many who toil among us right now during this pandemic are going through special travails and trouble to keep us fed and sheltered and safe. Called “essential workers,” trabajadores esenciales, many of them have journeyed here from foreign lands after terrible travails and travels of their own (two words that derive from the same tortuous linguistic roots). As in the era of Cervantes, so in our perilous times, to leave home, to wander in search of a secure haven in a merciless world is an ordeal beyond words in any language.

It gives me solace, though, that when so many of those migrants crossed the border into the United States where I now live, they brought their Spanish with them, their throats and lives full of aliento, inspiración, trabajo, sol, and solidaridad. Now may be the time to record them — or rather recordarlos — in the deepest meaning of that word, which is to restore them to our hearts, to open those hearts to them at a moment when we are all subject to such travails and plagues.

In concrete policy terms, this would mean creating a true path to citizenship, ciudadanía, for so many millions lacking documentos. It would mean reuniting (re-unir) the families that Donald Trump and his crew separated at our southern border and finding the missing children, los niños desaparecidos. It would mean building less disruptive walls and more roads, caminos, that connect us all.

There is no unidad without struggle Not all words in Spanish, of course, need to be translated for us to understand them. Pandemia, corrupción, crueldad, violencia, discriminación, muerte are sadly recognizable, wretchedly similar in languages across the globe as are the more hopeful, justicia, paz, rebelión, compasión. The same is true of President Biden’s favorite word of the moment, unidad, to which we should add a verb whose indispensability he and the Democratic Party should never forget, at least if there is to be real progress: luchar or to struggle.

Equally indispensable is a more primeval word that we can all immediately identify and make ours: mamá. Who has not called out to his or her mother in an hour of need, as George Floyd did at the very end of his existence? But the Spanish version of that word contains, I believe, a special resonance, related as it is to mamar — to suckle, to drink milk from the maternal breast as all mammals do — and so to that first act of human beings after we take that initial breath and cry.

For those of us who are grown up, an additional kind of sustenance is required to face an ominous future: “esperanza,” or hope, a word that fittingly stems from the same origin as respirar.

Many decades ago, Spanish welcomed me into the world and I am grateful that it continues to give me aliento in a land I’ve now made my own. It reminds me and my fellow citizens, my fellow humans, that to breathe and help others draw breath is the foundation of esperanza. The native language that I first heard from my mamá — even though she is long dead — still whispers the certainty that there is no other way for the spirit to prevail in these times of rage and solidarity and struggle, full of light and luz and lucha, so we may indeed someday fulfill the promise of “libertad y justicia para todos,” of liberty and justice for all.

Ariel Dorfman writes regularly for TomDispatch (where this article originated). He is the Chilean-American author of Death and the Maiden. His most recent books are Cautivos, a novel about Cervantes, the children’s story, The Rabbits Rebellion, and a forthcoming novel about the Apocalypse, The Compensation Bureau. He lives with his wife in Chile and in Durham, North Carolina, where he is a distinguished emeritus professor of literature at Duke University.

Copyright ©2021 Ariel Dorfman — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 15 February 2021

Word Count: 1,843

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When Martin Luther King preached his famous sermon “Beyond Vietnam” at Riverside Church in New York City in April 1967, I don’t recall giving his words a second thought. Although at the time I was just up the Hudson River attending West Point, his call for a “radical revolution in values” did not resonate with me. By upbringing and given my status as a soldier-in-the-making, radical revolutions were not my thing. To grasp the profound significance of the “the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism” to which he called his listeners’ attention was beyond my intellectual capacity. I didn’t even try to unpack their meaning.

In that regard, the ensuing decades have filled a void in my education. I long ago concluded that Dr. King was then offering the essential interpretive key to understanding our contemporary American dilemma. The predicament in which we find ourselves today stems from our reluctance to admit to the crippling interaction among the components of the giant triplets he described in that speech. True, racism, extreme materialism, and militarism each deserve — and separately sometimes receive — condemnation. But it’s the way that the three of them sustain one another that accounts for our nation’s present parlous condition.

Let me suggest that King’s prescription remains as valid today as when he issued it more than half a century ago — hence, my excuse for returning to it so soon after citing it in a previous TomDispatch. Sadly, however, neither the American people nor the American ruling class seem any more inclined to take that prescription seriously today than I was in 1967. We persist in rejecting Dr. King’s message.

Martin Luther King is enshrined in American memory as a great civil rights leader and rightly so. Yet as his Riverside Church Address made plain, his life’s mission went far beyond fighting racial discrimination. His real purpose was to save America’s soul, a self-assigned mission that was either wildly presumptuous or deeply prophetic.

In either case, his Riverside Church presentation was not well received at the time. Even in quarters generally supportive of the civil rights movement, press criticism was widespread. King’s detractors chastised him for straying out of his lane. “To divert the energies of the civil rights movement to the Vietnam issue is both wasteful and self-defeating,” the New York Times insisted. Its editorial board assured their readers that racism and the ongoing war were distinct and unrelated: “Linking these hard, complex problems will lead not to solutions but to deeper confusion.” King needed to stick to race and let others more qualified tend to war.

The Washington Post agreed. King’s ill-timed and ill-tempered presentation had “diminished his usefulness to his cause, to his country, and to his people.” According to the Post’s editorial board, King had “done a grave injury to those who are his natural allies” and “an even greater injury to himself.” His reputation had suffered permanent damage. “Many who have listened to him with respect will never again accord him the same respect.”

Life magazine weighed in with its own editorial slap on the wrist. To suggest any connection between the war in Vietnam and the condition of Black citizens at home, according to Life, was little more than “demagogic slander.” The ongoing conflict in Southeast Asia had “nothing to do with the legitimate battle for equal rights here in America.”

How could King not have seen that? In retrospect, we may wonder how ostensibly sophisticated observers could have overlooked the connection between racism, war, and a perverse value system that obsessively elevated and celebrated the acquisition and consumption of mere things.

More than the sum of its parts In recent months, more than a few stressed-out observers of the American scene have described 2020 as this nation’s Worst. Year. Ever. Only those with exceedingly short memories will buy such hyperbole.

As recently as the 1960s, dissent and disorder occurred on a far larger scale and a more sustained basis than anything that Americans have endured of late. No doubt Covid-19 and Donald Trump collaborated to make 2020 a year of genuine misery and death, with last month’s assault on the Capitol adding a disconcerting exclamation point to the nightmare.

But recall the headline events following King’s Riverside Church presentation. The year 1968 began with the Tet Offensive in Vietnam, which obliterated official claims that the United States was “winning” the war there. Next came North Korea’s audacious seizure of a U.S. Navy ship, the USS Pueblo, a national humiliation.  Soon after, President Lyndon Johnson’s surprise decision not to run for reelection turned the race for the presidency upside down.

In April, an assassin murdered Dr. King, an event that triggered rioting on a scale dwarfing 2020’s disturbances in Minneapolis, Minnesota, Portland, Oregon, and Kenosha, Wisconsin. (Mere days after the assassination, as I arrived in Washington for — of all things — a rugby tournament, fires were still burning and the skies were still black with smoke.) That June, not five years after his brother was shot and killed, Senator Robert Kennedy, his effort to win the Democratic presidential nomination just then gaining momentum, fell to an assassin’s bullet, his death stunning the nation and the world. The chaotic and violent Democratic National Convention, held in Chicago that August and broadcast live, suggested that the country was on the verge of coming apart at the seams. By year’s end, Richard Nixon, back from the political wilderness, was preparing to assume the reins as president — a prospect that left intact the anger and division that had been accumulating over the preceding 12 months.

True enough, the total number of American deaths caused by Covid-19 in 2020 greatly exceeds those from a distant war and domestic violence in 1968. Even so — and even without the menacing presence of Donald Trump looming over the political scene — the stress to which the nation was subjected in 1968 was at least as great as what occurred last year.

The point of making such a been-there/done-that comparison is not to suggest that, with Trump exiled to Mar-a-Lago, Americans can finally begin to relax, counting on Joe Biden to “build back better” and restore a semblance of normalcy to the country. Rather the point is that the evils afflicting our nation are deep-seated, persistent, and lie beyond the power of any mere president to remedy.

America’s twenty-first-century racist wars A devotion to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness defines the essence of the American way of life. So the Founders declared and so we are schooled to believe. Well, yes, replied Dr. King in 1967, but racism, materialism, and militarism have likewise woven themselves into the fabric of American life. As much as we may prefer to pretend otherwise, those giant triplets define who we are as much as Jefferson’s Declaration or the Framers’ Constitution do.

For various reasons, Donald Trump not least among them, racism today again ranks atop the hierarchy of issues commanding national attention. Political progressives, champions of diversity, cultural elites, and even multinational corporations attentive to the bottom line profess their commitment to ending racism (as they define it) finally and forever. Some not-trivial portion of the rest of the population — the white nationalists chanting “You will not replace us,” for example — hold to another view. The elimination of racism, assuming such a goal is even plausible, will surely entail a further protracted struggle.

By 1967, King had concluded that winning that fight required expanding the scope of analysis. Hence, the imperative of speaking out against the Vietnam War, which until that moment he had hesitated to do. For King, it had become “incandescently clear” that the ongoing war was poisoning “America’s soul.” Racism and war were intertwined. They fed upon one another.

By now, it should be incandescently clear that our own forever wars of the twenty-first century, fought on a distinctly lesser scale than Vietnam, though over an even longer period of time, have had a similar effect. The places that the United States bombs, invades, and/or occupies typically fall into the category of what President Trump once disparaged as “shithole countries.” The inhabitants tend to be impoverished, non-white, non-English speaking, and, by American standards, often not especially well-educated. They subscribe to customs and religious traditions that many Americans view as primitive if not altogether alien.

That the average G.I. should deem the lives of Afghans or Iraqis of lesser value than the life of an American may be regrettable, but given our history it can hardly be surprising. A persistent theme of American wars going back to the colonial era is that, once the shooting starts, difference signifies inferiority.

Although no high-ranking government official and no senior military officer will admit it, racism permeates our post-9/11 wars. And as is so often the case, poisons generated abroad have a curious knack for finding their way home.

With few exceptions, Americans prefer to ignore this reality. Implicit in the thank-you-for-your-service air kisses so regularly lofted toward the troops is an illusion that wartime service correlates with virtue, as if combat were a great builder of character. Last month’s assault on the Capitol should finally have made it impossible to sustain that illusion.

In fact, as a consequence of our post-9/11 “forever wars,” the virus of militarism has infected many quarters of American society, perhaps even more so in our day than in King’s. Among the evident results: the spread of racist and extreme right-wing ideologies within the ranks of the armed services; the conversion of police forces into quasi-military entities with a penchant for using excessive force against people of color; and the emergence of well-armed militia groups posing as “patriots” while conspiring to overturn the constitutional order.

It’s important, of course, not to paint such a picture with too broad a brush. Not every soldier is a neo-Nazi — not even close. Not every cop is a shoot-first, then-knock racist thug. Not every defender of the Second Amendment conspires to “stop the steal” and reinstall Donald Trump in the Oval Office. But bad soldiers, bad cops, and traitors who wrap themselves in the flag exist in disturbingly large numbers. Certainly, were he alive today, Martin Luther King would not flinch from pointing out that the American penchant for war in recent decades has yielded a host of perverse results here at home.

Then there’s King’s third triplet, hidden in plain sight: the “extreme materialism” of a people intent on satisfying appetites that are quite literally limitless in a society that has become ever more economically unequal. Americans have always been the people of more. Enough is never enough. True in 1776, this remains true today.

A nation in which “machines and computers, profit motives and property rights” take precedence over people, King warned in 1967, courts something akin to spiritual death. King’s primary concern was not the distribution of material wealth, but the obsessive importance attributed to accumulating and possessing it.

Embracing equity as a major theme, the Biden administration holds to a different view. Its stated aim is to enable the “underserved and left behind” to catch up, with priority attention given to “communities of color and other underserved Americans.” In short: more for some, but not for others.

Such an effort will inevitably produce a backlash. Given a culture that deems billionaires the ultimate fulfillment of the American dream, the only politically acceptable program is one that holds out the promise of more for all. Since its very first days, the purpose of the American Experiment has been to satisfy this demand for more, even if perpetuating that effort today inflicts untold damage on the natural environment.

Prophetic deficit In his Riverside Church sermon, King mused that “the world now demands a maturity of America that we may not be able to achieve.” In the decades since, has our nation “matured” in any meaningful sense? Or have the habits of consumption that defined our way of life in 1967 only become more entrenched, even as Information Age manipulations to which Americans willingly submit reinforce those habits further?

Maturity suggests wisdom and judgment. It implies experience put to good use. Does that describe the America of our time? Again, it’s important to avoid painting with too broad a brushstroke. But ours is a country in which 74 million Americans voted to give Donald Trump a second term, a larger total than any prior presidential candidate ever received. And ours is a country in which millions believe that a cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophiles controls the apparatus of government.

Whether wittingly or not, when Joe Biden committed himself in 2020 to saving “the soul of America,” he was echoing Martin Luther King in 1967. But saving the nation’s soul requires more than simply replacing Trump in the Oval Office, issuing a steady stream of executive orders, and reciting speeches off a teleprompter (something that Biden does with evident difficulty). 

Saving that soul requires moral imagination, a quality not commonly found in American politics. George Washington probably possessed it. Abraham Lincoln surely did. For a brief moment when delivering his Farewell Address, President Dwight D. Eisenhower spoke in a prophetic voice. So, too, did Jimmy Carter in his widely derided but enduringly profound “Malaise Speech” of 1979. But as this mere handful of examples suggests, the rough and tumble of political life only rarely accommodates prophets.

While Joe Biden may be a decent enough fellow, at no point in his long but not especially distinguished political career has he ever been mistaken for possessing prophetic gifts. Much the same can be said about the highly credentialed political veterans with whom he has surrounded himself: Kamala Harris, Antony Blinken, Lloyd Austin, Jake Sullivan, Janet Yellen, and the rest. When it comes to diversity, they check all the necessary boxes. Yet none of them gives even the slightest indication of grasping the plight of a nation held in the grip of King’s giant triplets.

As a devout Christian and a preacher of surpassing eloquence, King knew that salvation begins with an admission of sinfulness, followed by repentance. Only then does redemption become a possibility.

Only by acknowledging the evil caused by the simultaneous presence of racism and materialism and militarism at the heart of this country will it be remotely possible for the United States to take even the first few halting steps toward redemption. We await the prophetic voice that will awaken the American people to this imperative.

Andrew Bacevich writes regularly for TomDispatch (where this article originated). He is president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. His most recent book is The Age of Illusions: How America Squandered Its Cold War Victory. His new book, After the Apocalypse: America’s Role in a World Transformed, will be published in 2021.

Copyright ©2021 Andrew Bacevich — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 11 February 2021

Word Count: 2,402

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If you live in California, you’re likely to be consumed on occasion by thoughts of fire. That’s not surprising, given that, in last year alone, actual fires consumed over four and a quarter million acres of the state, taking with them 10,488 structures, 33 human lives, and who knows how many animals. By the end of this January, a month never before even considered part of the “fire” season, 10 wildfires had already burned through 2,337 more acres, according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (CalFire).

With each passing year, the state’s fire season arrives earlier and does greater damage. In 2013, a mere eight years ago, fires consumed about 602,000 acres and started significantly later. That January, CalFire reported only a single fire, just two in February, and none in March. Fire season didn’t really begin until April and had tapered off before year’s end. This past December, however, 10 fires still burned at least 10,000 acres. In fact, it almost doesn’t make sense to talk about a fire “season” anymore. Whatever the month, wildfires are likely to be burning somewhere in the state.

Clearly, California’s fires (along with Oregon’s and Washington’s) are getting worse. Just as clearly, notwithstanding Donald Trump’s exhortations to do a better job of “raking” our forests, climate change is the main cause of this growing disaster.

Fortunately, President Joe Biden seems to take the climate emergency seriously. In just his first two weeks in office, he’s cancelled the Keystone XL pipeline project, forbidden new drilling for oil or gas on public lands, and announced a plan to convert the entire federal fleet of cars and trucks to electric vehicles. Perhaps most important of all, he’s bringing the U.S. back into the Paris climate accords, signaling an understanding that a planetary crisis demands planetwide measures and that the largest carbon-emitting economies should be leading the way. “This isn’t [the] time for small measures,” Biden has said. “We need to be bold.”

Let’s just hope that such boldness has arrived in time and that the Biden administration proves unwilling to sacrifice the planet on an altar of elusive congressional unity and illusionary bipartisanship.

Another kind of fire If climate change threatens human life as we know it, so does another potential form of “fire” — the awesome power created when a nuclear reaction converts matter to energy. This is the magic of Einstein’s observation that e=mc², or that the energy contained in a bit of matter is equal to its mass (roughly speaking, its weight) multiplied by the speed of light expressed in meters per second. Roughly speaking, as we’ve all known since August 6, 1945, when an atomic bomb was dropped on the Japanese city of Hiroshima, that’s an awful lot of energy. When a nuclear reaction is successfully controlled, the energy can be regulated and used to produce electricity without emitting carbon dioxide in the process.

Unfortunately, while nuclear power plants don’t add greenhouse gasses to the atmosphere, they do create radioactive waste, some of which remains deadly for thousands of years. Industry advocates who argue for nuclear power as a “green” alternative generally ignore the problem — which has yet to be solved — of disposing of that waste.

In what hopefully is just a holdover from the Trump administration, the Energy Department website still “addresses” this issue by suggesting that all the nuclear waste produced to date “could fit on a football field at a depth of less than 10 yards!” The site neglects to add that, if you shoved that 3,456,000 square feet of nuclear waste together the wrong way, the resultant explosive chain reaction would probably wipe out most life on Earth.

Remember, too, that “controlled” nuclear reactions don’t always remain under human control. Ask anyone who lived near the Three Mile Island nuclear reactor in Pennsylvania, the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in the Ukraine, or the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Japan.

There is, however, another far more devastating form of “controlled” nuclear reaction, the kind created when a nuclear bomb explodes. Only one country has ever deployed atomic weapons in war, of course: the United States, in its attack on Hiroshima and, three days later, on Nagasaki. Those bombs were of the older uranium-based variety and were puny by the standards of today’s nuclear weapons. Still, the horror of those attacks was sufficient to convince many that such weapons should never be used again.

Treaties and entreaties In the decades since 1945, various configurations of nations have agreed to treaties prohibiting the use of, or limiting the proliferation of, nuclear weapons — even as the weaponry spread and nuclear arsenals grew. In the Cold War decades, the most significant of these were the bilateral pacts between the two superpowers of the era, the U.S. and the Soviet Union. When the latter collapsed in 1991, Washington signed treaties instead with the Russian Federation government, the most recent being the New START treaty, which came into effect in 2011 and was just extended by Joe Biden and Vladimir Putin.

In addition to such bilateral agreements, the majority of nations on the planet agreed on various multilateral pacts, including the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, or NPT, which has been signed by 191 countries and has provided a fairly effective mechanism for limiting the spread of such arms. Today, there are still “only” nine nuclear-armed states. Of these, six have signed the NPT, but just five of them — China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, and United States — admit to possessing such weaponry. Israel, which also signed the pact, has never publicly acknowledged its growing nuclear arsenal. Three other nuclear-armed countries — India, Pakistan, and North Korea — have never signed the treaty at all. Worse yet, in 2005, the George W. Bush administration inked a side-deal with India that gave Washington’s blessing to the acceleration of that country’s nuclear weapons development program outside the monitoring constraints of the NPT.

The treaty assigns to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) the authority to monitor compliance. It was this treaty, for example, that gave the IAEA the right to inspect Iraq’s nuclear program in the period before the U.S. invaded in 2003. Indeed, the IAEA repeatedly reported that Iraq was, in fact, in compliance with the treaty in the months that preceded the invasion, despite the claims of the Bush administration that Iraqi ruler Saddam Hussein had such weaponry. The United States must act, President Bush insisted then, before the “smoking gun” of proof the world demanded turned out to be a “mushroom cloud” over some American city. As became clear after the first few months of the disastrous U.S. military occupation, there simply were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. (At least partly in recognition of the IAEA’s attempts to forestall that U.S. invasion, the agency and its director general, Mohamed El Baradei, would receive the 2005 Nobel Peace Prize.)

Like Iraq, Iran also ratified the NPT in 1968, laying the foundation for ongoing IAEA inspections there. In recent years, having devastated Iraq’s social, economic, and political infrastructure, the United States shifted its concern about nuclear proliferation to Iran. In 2015, along with China, Russia, France, the United Kingdom, Germany, and the European Union, the Obama administration signed the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), informally known as the Iran nuclear deal.

Under the JCPOA, in return for the lifting of onerous economic sanctions that were affecting the whole population, Iran agreed to limit the development of its nuclear capacity to the level needed to produce electricity. Again, IAEA scientists would be responsible for monitoring the country’s compliance, which by all accounts was more than satisfactory — at least until 2018. That’s when President Donald Trump unilaterally pulled the U.S. out of the agreement and reimposed heavy sanctions. Since then, as its economy began to be crushed, Iran was, understandably enough, reluctant to uphold its end of the bargain.

In the years since 1945, the world has seen treaties signed to limit or ban the testing of nuclear weapons or to cap the size of nuclear arsenals, as well as bilateral treaties to decommission parts of existing ones, but never a treaty aimed at outlawing nuclear weapons altogether. Until now. On January 22, 2021, the United Nations Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons took effect. Signed so far by 86 countries, the treaty represents “a legally binding instrument to prohibit nuclear weapons, leading towards their total elimination,” according to the U.N. Sadly, but unsurprisingly, none of the nine nuclear powers are signatories.

“Fire and fury” I last wrote about nuclear danger in October 2017 when Donald Trump had been in the White House less than a year and, along with much of the world, I was worried that he might bungle his way into a war with North Korea. Back then, he and Kim Jong-un had yet to fall in love or to suffer their later public breakup. Kim was still “Little Rocket Man” to Trump, who had threatened to “rain fire and fury like the world has never seen” on North Korea.

The world did, in the end, survive four years of a Trump presidency without a nuclear war, but that doesn’t mean he left us any safer. On the contrary, he took a whole series of rash steps leading us closer to nuclear disaster:

• He pulled the U.S. out of the JCPOA, thereby destabilizing the Iran nuclear agreement and reigniting Iran’s threats (and apparent efforts toward) someday developing nuclear weapons.

• He withdrew from the 1987 Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty between the U.S. and the Soviet Union (later the Russian Federation), which, according to the nonpartisan Arms Control Association,

“required the United States and the Soviet Union to eliminate and permanently forswear all of their nuclear and conventional ground-launched ballistic and cruise missiles with ranges of 500 to 5,500 kilometers. The treaty marked the first time the superpowers had agreed to reduce their nuclear arsenals, eliminate an entire category of nuclear weapons, and employ extensive on-site inspections for verification.”

• He withdrew from the Open Skies Treaty, which gave signatories permission to fly over each other’s territories to identify military installations and activities. Allowing this kind of access was meant to contribute to greater trust among nuclear-armed nations.

• He threatened to allow the New START Treaty to expire, should he be reelected.

• He presided over a huge increase in spending on the “modernization” of the U.S. nuclear arsenal, including on new submarine- and land-based launching capabilities. A number of these programs are still in their initial stages and could be stopped by the Biden administration.

In January 2021, after four years of Trump, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists adjusted its “Doomsday Clock,” moving the minute hand forward, to a mere 100 seconds to midnight. Since 1947, that Clock’s annual resetting has reflected how close, in the view of the Bulletin’s esteemed scientists and Nobel laureates, humanity has come to ending it all. As the Bulletin’s editors note, “The Clock has become a universally recognized indicator of the world’s vulnerability to catastrophe from nuclear weapons, climate change, and disruptive technologies in other domains.”

Why so close to midnight? The magazine lists a number of reasons, including the increased danger of nuclear war, due in large part to steps taken by the United States in the Trump years, as well as to the development of “hypersonic” missiles, which are supposed to fly at five times the speed of sound and so evade existing detection systems. (Trump famously referred to these “super-duper” weapons as “hydrosonic,” a term that actually describes a kind of toothbrush.) There is disagreement among weapons experts about the extent to which such delivery vehicles will live up to the (hyper) hype about them, but the effort to build them is destabilizing in its own right.

The Bulletin points to a number of other factors that place humanity in ever greater danger. One is, of course, the existential threat of climate change. Another is the widespread dissemination of “false and misleading information.” The spread of lies about Covid-19, its editors say, exemplifies the life-threatening nature of a growing “wanton disregard for science and the large-scale embrace of conspiratorial nonsense.” This is, they note, “often driven by political figures and partisan media.” Such attacks on knowledge itself have “undermined the ability of responsible national and global leaders to protect the security of their citizens.”

Passing the (nuclear) ball When Donald Trump announced that he wouldn’t attend the inauguration of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, few people were surprised. After all, he was still insisting that he’d actually won the election, even after that big lie fueled an insurrectionary invasion of the Capitol. But there was another reason for concern: if Trump was going to be at Mar-a-Lago, how would he hand over the “nuclear football” to the new president? That “football” is, in fact, a briefcase containing the nuclear launch codes, which presidents always have with them. Since the dawn of the nuclear age, it’s been passed from the outgoing president to the new one on Inauguration Day.

Consternation! The problem was resolved through the use of two briefcases, which were simultaneously deactivated and activated at 11:59:59 a.m. on January 20th, just as Biden was about to be sworn in.

The football conundrum pointed to a far more serious problem, however — that the fate of humanity regularly hangs on the actions of a single individual (whether as unbalanced as Donald Trump or as apparently sensible as Joe Biden) who has the power to begin a war that could end our species.

There’s good reason to think that Joe Biden will be more reasonable about the dangers of nuclear warfare than the narcissistic idiot he succeeds. In addition to agreeing to extend the New START treaty, he’s also indicated a willingness to rejoin the Iran nuclear deal and criticized Trump’s nuclear buildup. Nevertheless, the power to end the world shouldn’t lie with one individual. Congress could address this problem, by (as I suggested in 2017) enacting “a law that would require a unanimous decision by a specified group of people (for example, officials like the secretaries of state and defense together with the congressional leadership) for a nuclear first strike.”

The fire next time?

God gave Noah the rainbow sign

No more water but the fire next time

These words come from the African-American spiritual “I Got a Home in that Rock.” The verse refers to God’s promise to Noah in Genesis, after the great flood, never again to destroy all life on earth, a promise signified by the rainbow.

Those who composed the hymn may have been a bit less trusting of God — or of human destiny — than the authors of Genesis, since the Bible account says nothing about fire or a next time. Sadly, recent human history suggests that there could indeed be a next time. If we do succeed in destroying ourselves, it seems increasingly likely that it will be by fire, whether the accelerating heating of the globe over decades, or a nuclear conflagration any time we choose. The good news, the flame of hope, is that we still have time — at least 100 seconds — to prevent it.

Rebecca Gordon writes regularly for TomDispatch (where this article originated). She teaches at the University of San Francisco. She is the author of American Nuremberg: The U.S. Officials Who Should Stand Trial for Post-9/11 War Crimes and is now at work on a new book on the history of torture in the United States.

Copyright ©2021 Rebecca Gordon — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 09 February 2021

Word Count: 2,526

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The nightmare is over. The vanquished beast has crawled back to Mar-a-Lago to lick his wounds. The heroes are hard at work repairing the damage. As America returns to the international stage, the world heaves a collective sigh of relief.

That, at least, is the story the incoming Biden administration is telling. “America is back, multilateralism is back, diplomacy is back,” as Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the administration’s nominee for U.N. ambassador, put it shortly after the election. According to this narrative of redemption, the globe’s Atlas shrugged off its burden during the four years of Donald Trump’s tenure but is now ready to reassume its global leadership responsibilities.

Don’t believe it, though. Much of the rest of the world seems visibly queasy at the prospect of sitting on America’s shoulders, since who’s to say that Atlas won’t shrug again?

And perhaps Atlas wasn’t such a responsible fellow in the first place.

Over the last several decades, the United States has displayed all the hallmarks of a country suffering from a serious personality disorder characterized by mood swings of gargantuan proportions. From the compromised multilateralism of the Bill Clinton years, the United States pivoted to the aggressive armed unilateralism of George W. Bush. Then, after boomeranging back to the centrist (if still over-armed) internationalism of Barack Obama, it took the wildest of detours into MAGA-land with Donald Trump. In the latest case of foreign-policy whiplash, Joe Biden is now preparing to return the country to a “new and improved” version of Obama’s global liberalism (with a dash of anti-Chinese fervor thrown in).

Americans are by now remarkably familiar with such side effects of twenty-first-century democracy. We’ve skimmed the fine print on the label more than once and become reasonably inured to the adverse consequences of our civic religion.

Much of the world, however, is not accustomed to such volatility. The Kim family has ruled North Korea from day one, while Paul Biya has run Cameroon since 1982. Over the last 30 years, China has settled into its predictable version of market Leninism. Putatively democratic countries like Russia and Turkey have had the same leadership for two decades, while a genuinely democratic country like Germany has had the same chancellor for 15 years. The rest of Western Europe has seen numerous changes in those who hold the reins of power, but oscillations in governance have generally stayed within a relatively narrow political spectrum. European Union policies have similarly remained on a remarkably even keel, despite disruptions like Brexit.

These days, however, democrats and dictators alike are unsure, from one day to the next, whether the United States will be Dr. Jekyll or Mr. Hyde.

On the surface, the international community has generally provided a warm welcome to the incoming administration, if only out of profound relief at seeing the backside of Donald Trump. True, it took Vladimir Putin a while to get around to acknowledging Joe Biden’s victory, while Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil grumbled about the departure of his American BFF, as did Hungary’s Viktor Orbán and a number of other right-wing populists.

But Biden was a clear international favorite in the recent presidential election. According to an Ipsos poll of people in 24 countries, Biden had an edge of 48% to 17% over Trump, with only the Russians as outliers. And postelection, the favorability of the United States has only risen (except perhaps in Russia and China).

Beneath the surface, however, the world is hesitant, like an oft-jilted lover. Country after country has been burned too many times to throw itself back into such a relationship without reservations, if not a full-blown prenuptial agreement. As NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg put it with characteristic understatement, “There is a need to rebuild trust between Europe and the United States.” Indeed, just about every member of the U.N. General Assembly would undoubtedly have agreed.

Such an erosion of trust defines what it means to be an unreliable superpower. Even as the Biden administration works to “build back better,” allies and adversaries alike are busy hedging their bets, concerned that the United States is simply too unpredictable a place to park political capital. And where it remains all-too-predictable — as in its preposterous levels of military spending or its obdurate sense of exceptionalism — Washington no longer looks to many like a reliable global actor from the perspective of peace or prosperity.

The Biden administration seems remarkably tone-deaf when it comes to the hesitancy of the international community to repeat past mistakes. “We can make America, once again, the leading force for good in the world,” Biden insisted in his Inaugural Address. “We will lead not merely by the example of our power but by the power of our example.”

With its talk of regaining global leadership, the Biden administration seems as committed to the notion that the United States is still “the indispensable power” as it was when former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright uttered that phrase in 1998. “If we have to use force, it is because we are America,” Albright told Matt Lauer back then on The Today Show. “We stand tall and we see further than other countries into the future, and we see the danger here to all of us.”

Particularly in the wake of the travesties of the Trump era, the global stature of this indispensable land has shrunk immeasurably. In their responses to crises like Covid-19 and a warming planet, other countries now stand taller and see further into the future. More ominously, the danger they do see increasingly has the stars and stripes plastered all over it.

Reversing the reverses Donald Trump didn’t even have to wait for a new administration to reverse his policies. He was perfectly capable of reversing them himself — multiple times.

No wonder NATO head Stoltenberg has been preoccupied with the issue of trust. As a candidate, Trump swore NATO was “obsolete,” only to change his mind within months of taking office. Yet, a year later, he was talking about pulling the United States out of the alliance completely. By 2020, on the other hand, he was suggesting incorporating Middle Eastern countries into it.

And Trump wasn’t just fickle when it came to NATO. In 2017, he threatened North Korea with the “fire and fury” of nuclear destruction only to sit down with North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un two years later. He went back and forth about Chinese leader Xi Jinping, too, claiming in 2018 that “Xi and I will always be friends,” only to call him an “enemy” a year later. He then reversed himself with his early 2020 avowal that “we love each other,” before turning hostile yet again in the COVID-19 era. What Trump diehards argued was crafty bargaining looked a whole lot more like beginner’s incoherence.

Joe Biden has already taken a more consistent approach to reversing Trump’s policies than The Donald did to his own policies. In his first executive orders, the new president brought the United States back into the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Paris climate accords. He reversed Trump’s policies on immigration, cancelled the Muslim travel ban, and ended funding for the largely unbuilt wall on the border with Mexico. He quickly hit rewind on those environmental deregulations of the Trump administration and the previous president’s approval of the Keystone XL pipeline.

In addition, the Biden team soon hopes to reenter the Iran nuclear deal, revive arms control negotiations with Russia, and at least mitigate the impact of the trade sanctions against China.

That’s all to the good. But who’s to say that the next occupant of the Oval Office won’t reverse Biden’s reversal of Trump’s reversal of Obama’s initiatives?

In addition, once the sugar rush of Biden’s executive orders fades, an immediate threat lurks: Congress. The Democratic Party controls both houses — but just barely. The lack of a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate is likely to be a significant obstacle to any lasting transformation of key aspects of foreign policy in a more peaceful and cooperative direction, even if the Biden administration were committed to such a goal.

Republicans are already hoping to delay the U.S. reentry into the Iran nuclear deal, complicate Washington’s involvement in global efforts to address the climate crisis, and keep the pressure on both China and Russia. Trying to ratify a treaty to ban all nuclear tests or make the United States a member of the International Criminal Court, which would require a two-thirds vote in the Senate, will prove even longer shots.

What Americans interpret as an insider game of partisanship, the rest of the world sees as a hamstrung country incapable of acting decisively on international problems. And such a deadlock might turn into something even worse. Trump’s MAGA crew are, after all, alive and well in Congress and throughout the red states. Should things go badly economically or pandemically for the Biden White House, they could regain control of one or both chambers in the midterm elections of 2022.

Even more troubling is the extremist wildcard. The events of January 6th shocked the world into realizing that America’s lunatic fringe is no longer content just to lurk on the margins of politics as Internet trolls and barstool conspiracy theorists. It’s one thing to take into account the logjams produced by Republican Party obstructionism. It’s quite another to worry that the United States will tip into a second civil war.

Smart money avoids such risks.

How the United States is reliably unreliable Even when this country is predictable, it’s still an unreliable global partner.

Take the issue of Covid-19. The Biden administration has made a splash by instantly rejoining the WHO and resuming its financial obligations to it. In the last stimulus package, Congress anticipated this trend by including $4 billion in funding for GAVI, a global vaccine alliance, with Democrats acknowledging that “we are not truly safe until the whole world is safe from the coronavirus.”

But when the rubber hits the road — and the needles hit the arms — the United States has promptly fallen back on its usual exceptionalism. In the chaos of the immediate post-Trumpian moment, the Biden administration has been pushing to vaccinate as many Americans as possible without significant regard for anyone else. Along with other rich countries, Washington has exercised purchase options that could more or less corner the market on vaccines, securing enough doses, in the end, to inoculate Americans nearly five times over.

The global effort to vaccinate lower-income countries, also known by the acronym COVAX, is several billion dollars short of what it needs even to begin seriously implementing its plan. And keep in mind that the plan itself is woefully insufficient, since it aims to vaccinate only 20% of the inhabitants of participating nations by the end of 2021.

Not every country is practicing vaccine nationalism though. Even as it rushes to inoculate its 1.3 billion citizens, India is helping out its neighbors, providing two million doses free of charge to Bangladesh, aiding Nepal and Myanmar, and even sending its vaccines to Brazil and Morocco. Both China and Russia are also engaging in vaccine diplomacy, reaching out to the Global South with their lower-cost versions of Covid-19 drugs.

Putting America first extends to other aspects of geopolitics as well. The United States can, for instance, be counted upon to remain the world’s top arms exporter in the Biden years. In 2020, it signed agreements for more than $175 billion in sales of military hardware to other countries, far above what runner-up Russia manages to push out. Of course, such exports, in turn, fuel armed conflicts overseas, while inflating military budgets all over the world.

America is also number one when it comes to overseas military bases, with hundreds of facilities around the world, which militarize communities and serve as launching pads for U.S. operations. In comparison, Russia, France, and the United Kingdom together maintain a total of 30 such bases. And add in one more thing: aside from Australia, a few island nations, and tiny Gulf states, the United States has the highest per-capita carbon footprint on the planet. In its rush to use the planet’s resources, our country is making it more likely that the planet will soon be uninhabitable for much of humanity.

With a reliably unreliable friend like that, who needs enemies?

The world hedges its bets Russia was one of the few places on Earth, from its government to its citizenry, that showed little excitement for recent political developments in Washington.

“From Russia’s perspective, the political situation in the United States has not fundamentally changed as a result of the election,” said Dmitry Suslov of the National Research University Higher School of Economics in Moscow. “The intense political polarization that we have witnessed over the past four years is not going away anywhere, so obviously Biden will not have a broad mandate to govern.” Because of this political deadlock, Suslov added, Russia would avoid any direct conflict with the United States and instead improve relations with China and other powers like India.

Russia is a little late to the game. China was hedging its bets long before the November election. Its trillion-dollar-plus Belt and Road Initiative of infrastructure development in Eurasia (and northeastern Africa), launched in 2013 to refocus key global financial and economic relations on Beijing, was also meant to be an enormous insurance policy against any downturn in economic relations with the United States. Beijing’s creation of separate global financial institutions — like the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank established in 2015 — and trade pacts like the recent Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership of 15 Asia-Pacific nations (but not the United States) were also efforts meant to shield China from American missteps and inaction that could drag down the global economy.

U.S. allies, too, have been taking precautions. Europe has been slowly building up an independent military capacity just in case Washington does eventually decide that NATO is obsolete. What the Europeans have come to call “strategic autonomy” represents not just a next step for European integration but protection against the increasing unreliability of Washington. The European Defense Fund, set up in 2017, received a healthy chunk of capital in its latest budget — about eight billion Euro — and that’s just a down payment on what France would like to see and Germany is grudgingly coming around to envisioning: the folding up of the U.S. security umbrella.

South Korea, one of this country’s most trusted security partners, has been working on developing its own strategic autonomy for some time. Despite the budgetary pressures of a Covid-19-related economic downturn, strenuous efforts to improve ties with North Korea, and a generally friendlier relationship with China, the South Korean government pushed through a 5.4% increase in military spending for 2021. Seoul is similarly concerned about the possibility that Washington will, sooner or later, reduce its Pacific presence.

The United States continues to maintain by far the most powerful and heavily funded military on the planet. Its economy is either the world’s largest or just behind China’s, depending on what yardstick you care to use. Like former basketball star Michael Jordan contemplating one last NBA championship, the U.S. foreign policy establishment is reluctant to give up on the adrenaline rush of being top dog on Planet Earth. But a pattern of erratic behavior can gradually undermine the trust necessary to maintain the extensive military alliances and trade relationships that sustain superpower status. The United States might just be too tired, too divided, or too crazy to stay number one much longer.

A history of volatility When Joe Biden says that this country “will lead not merely by the example of our power but by the power of our example,” it’s not entirely clear what example he means.

Does he mean American economic innovation — iPhones and electric cars — or the astonishing economic inequality of a country with the most billionaires on Earth in which one in eight citizens go hungry? Does he mean the country that puts itself forward as a seasoned mediator of conflicts or the one that spends more on its military than the next 10 nations combined? Does he mean the land with a Statue of Liberty that welcomes the “homeless” and the “tempest-tost,” or the one that has routinely divided families through mass deportations?

The shift in tone from the Trump administration to the new Biden era is certainly extreme, leading many allies to hope that the November election provided the necessary dose of electroshock therapy to restore the United States to sanity. Plenty of Americans — and overseas friends of America — would like to believe that the Trump years were a bizarre deviation from the norm. But there’s also a sneaking suspicion that extremism is becoming the new normal here and that events like the January 6th insurrection will only further fry what remains of the country’s synapses.

That insurrection may have destroyed Donald Trump’s chances of reelection in 2024, while possibly undermining the ambitions of his diehard champions in Congress like Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz as well. It might even drive a fatal wedge through the Republican Party, whether or not Trump actually creates a third party as he’s threatened to do.

But volatility has long been a fixture of American politics, from fistfights on the floor of Congress in the nineteenth century to the Barry Goldwaters and Newt Gingriches of the twentieth century. In our time, the resistance of the Tea Party, white nationalist militias, and QAnon to the United States becoming a truly multicultural country has kept American extremism alive. This paranoid style may have reached only an intermediate peak with the presidency of Donald Trump.

If such forces once again gain power or even mobilize enough strength to derail the modest ambitions of the Biden administration, the U.S. “example” will be one the world will want to avoid at any cost. Political instability will be the next compelling reason, after the Covid-19 pandemic fades, to quarantine this country. As for America’s unreliability as a global partner, it could prove to be an early sign of inevitable superpower decline into dissension, decay, and madness.

John Feffer writes regularly for TomDispatch — where this article originated. He is the author of  the dystopian novel Splinterlands and the director of Foreign Policy In Focus at the Institute for Policy Studies. Frostlands, a Dispatch Books original, is volume two of his Splinterlands series and the final novel, Songlands, will be published in June. He has also written The Pandemic Pivot.

Copyright ©2021 John Feffer — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 08 February 2021

Word Count: 3,011

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Developed by John Maynard Keynes during the Great Depression, Keynesian economics provides a blueprint for combating economic stagnation and helping people survive difficult economic times. It advocates government spending programs and tax cuts for the poor and middle class, aiding those in greatest need. Spending by the masses would then generate economic growth and more jobs.

History has shown that Keynesian economics works. The New Deal and spending to fight World War II ended the Great Depression in the United States. After the war, the GI Bill provided a college education, medical benefits, and low-interest mortgages to veterans. Demand for college, medical care, and housing soared; the U.S. economy boomed. And LBJ’s War on Poverty and Great Society programs, including Medicare and Medicaid, led to a booming economy in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Keynesian economics dominated policymaking until around 1980. Then things changed. Republicans pushed tax cuts for corporations and the rich, although neither group needed the extra money and didn’t spend most of it. In 2018, corporations used the windfalls gained from Trump’s Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 to buy outstanding shares of their stock. Share prices rose; spending barely changed. Wall Street gained. On Main Street things remained the same.

Even worse, Republicans have used Keynesian insights to sabotage the U.S. economy for political ends. When they controlled the government, Republicans ignored the large budget deficits stemming from their tax cuts. When Democrats were in the White House, deficits suddenly became a problem that could only be solved by cutting government spending, largely on needed social programs. Less spending would in turn reduce economic growth and job creation, making it harder for Democrats to win the next Presidential election.

This strategy underpinned Covid-19 relief bills in 2020. Congress passed the $2.2 trillion CARES Act in March, helping small businesses, state and local governments, and the unemployed. Also, a $1,200 check bearing Donald Trump’s signature was sent to Americans making under $100,000 a year. All this was aimed at keeping the U.S. economy from collapsing and improving Trump’s re-election chances (sic).

But these assistance programs were either one-offs (the check) or they expired after a few months. In May, House Democrats passed a $3 trillion Covid relief bill. The Republican-controlled Senate dithered from June to October. As it became more and more likely that Joe Biden would win the 2020 Presidential election, they increasingly balked at another relief bill, claiming Congress had done enough already and the U.S. didn’t need additional debt. Their real goal was to cripple “the Biden economy” in 2021 and into 2022, making Republican victories in the 2022 midterms and the 2024 presidential election more likely.

In late December, Congress finally passed a $900 billion Covid relief bill which President Trump signed into law on December 27. $900 billion, however, was shamefully inadequate given the headwinds facing the U.S. economy in 2021. Consumer confidence and retail sales both fell in October, November, and December. Employment fell by 140,000 in December 2020, the first such drop since April. New weekly claims for unemployment benefits during January have been nearly 1,000,000, compared with 200,000-250,000 at this time a year ago. Millions of small businesses are ready to throw in the towel in addition to those that have already done so. Debt-ridden state and local governments are ready to slash spending and lay off many hundreds of thousands of workers.

The December Covid relief bill was also seriously flawed. Most of the money went to help small businesses ($285 billion), extend unemployment benefits ($290 billion), and deliver $600 checks to most Americans ($170 billion). As with the CARES Act, checks went mainly to people who remain employed and didn’t need them. Sending the checks to everyone doesn’t focus help where it is needed most, and so a large portion of the $170 billion effectively went to waste.

Much of this money will be saved rather than spent, adding little demand to the economy. Another $82 billion went to state and local governments to fund education (K-12 and college). The remaining funds were directed to help produce and distribute Covid-19 vaccines, give tax breaks to business firms, provide food aid to the poor, and help build the President’s wall. Little here is Keynesian.

A first order of business in 2021 must be to enact policies to help those struggling most — state and local governments, small businesses, and the unemployed.

Unlike the Federal government, states can’t print money and must balance their budgets annually. State and local governments project deficits exceeding $250 billion in 2020, in 2021, and again in 2022, mainly because of reduced tax revenues. Local governments have already cut their spending sharply, laying off firefighters, teachers, trash collectors, etc. State and local government employment is down over 1.3 million since February 2020, and will sharply decline again without substantial Federal support. If state and local governments reduce spending by only $300 billion, one-third of the entire $900 billion Covid relief package passed in December will be countered by the actions of lower levels of government.

A Keynesian remedy is simple and easy here. The Federal government must give a large sum of money (at least another $400 billion) to state and local governments so that they don’t lay off their workers. President Biden’s $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan proposes $440 billion in aid to state and local governments.

High unemployment also calls for Keynesian remedies. During recessions, the Federal government typically extends eligibility for unemployment and picks up the added cost. However, this doesn’t help one-third of the labor force — those not qualifying for unemployment benefits because they are self-employed or fail to meet stringent state requirements regarding past work history. Nor does it deal with the problem of insufficient assistance. U.S. unemployment insurance replaces just 57% of after-tax wages ($320 per week, on average). Some states (Arkansas, Louisiana, and Mississippi) provide less than $220 per week. In Oklahoma weekly unemployment benefits average just $44.

The March 2020 CARES Act added $600 per week in Federal money to state unemployment benefits, and made the self-employed and gig workers eligible for unemployment assistance. Some people received more from unemployment than they could get from working, which became a Republican excuse to let this provision expire in September. The December Covid relief bill provided an extra $300 per week until mid-March. With only a small fraction of the U.S. population vaccinated against Covid-19 by then, and the economy likely to be in recession during the first half of 2021, this is insufficient. Again, President Biden’s $1.9 trillion Covid-19 assistance plan makes things better by increasing the $300 extra per week to $400 extra per week, and extending eligibility for this money through September.

Helping small business is also necessary. Small firms (with under 500 employees) comprise 99% of all U.S. businesses and employ 50% of all U.S. workers. They are failing in record number. More than half of small business owners surveyed in the middle of 2020 thought they would have to shut down their business by the end of Q1 in 2021. Firms dependent on tourism and firms needing people to congregate indoors (like restaurants) are especially vulnerable.

The Paycheck Protection Program (PPP), part of the CARES Act, helped somewhat. It enabled small businesses to borrow 10 weeks of usual expenses with the loan forgiven if firms maintain their payroll. But PPP had many problems. Money went to firms (like the LA Lakers) that weren’t struggling, and to small businesses owned by private equity firms, wealthy individuals, or larger businesses.

Biden’s American Rescue Plan provides insufficient relief for small businesses, with proposed grants amounting to $15 billion. Implementations of the second PPP (in the December bill) and then a third PPP (contemplated in the Biden bill) are unlikely to avoid the earlier problems outlined above.

The UK developed a more Keynesian and more effective solution, helping both workers and firms, and circumventing problems associated with PPP. With the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme the Conservative UK government gave money to furloughed workers retained as employees. It paid them as much as 80% of their usual wages, with the government covering 60% of previous wages and the firm 20%. Low-income workers were also eligible for an additional monthly payment, up to the equivalent of $500. Firms survived because their largest expense (payroll) was largely covered by the government. Thriving liquor stores got no government aid; employees of struggling pubs received a good deal of assistance.

There are lots of good provisions in the Biden relief bill. Besides the additional aid to state and local governments and the expanded unemployment benefits, there is an expansion of the child tax credit, expanded paid leave and sick leave, and mortgage foreclosure and eviction relief. But the bill fails to provide needed help to small businesses on the brink of bankruptcy. This will not keep millions of small firms from closing their doors and laying off workers, making a Republican victory more likely in the 2024 Presidential election — perhaps even with Donald Trump running again on the Republican ticket. The UK Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme would be a better model for the U.S. to follow.

Steven Pressman is professor of economics at Colorado State University, author of Fifty Major Economists, 3rd edition (Routledge, 2013), and president of the Association for Social Economics.

Copyright ©2021 The Washington Spectator — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 03 February 2021

Word Count: 1,525

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When it comes to war, if personnel is policy, America is yet again in deep trouble.

As retired Army Major Danny Sjursen recently pointed out at TomDispatch, when it comes to foreign policy, President Joe Biden’s new cabinet and advisers are well stocked with retired generals, reconstituted neocons, unapologetic hawks, and similar war enthusiasts. Biden himself has taken to asking God to protect the troops whenever he makes a major speech. (How about protecting them by bringing them home from our pointless wars?) “Defense” spending, as war spending is generally known in this country, remains at record levels at $740.5 billion for fiscal year 2021. Talk of a new cold war with Russia or China (or both) paradoxically warms Pentagon offices and corridors with yet more funds. The only visible dove of peace at Biden’s inaugural was the giant golden brooch worn by Lady Gaga. So what exactly is to be done?

Peace-driven progressive policies will not emerge easily from the rainbow kettle of hawks Biden has so far assembled, but his inaugural speech did mention leading and inspiring others globally “not merely by the example of our power but by the power of our example.” It would have been an apt rhetorical flourish indeed, if not for this country’s “forever wars” in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen, and elsewhere across the Greater Middle East and Africa. America’s harsh war-fighting reality suggests that “the example of our power” still remains standard operating procedure inside the Washington Beltway. How could this possibly be changed?

I have a few ideas for Biden — a 10-point plan, in fact, for turning his softball rhetoric into hardball reality. Consider, Mr. President, the following powerful examples you could set as America’s latest commander-in-chief:

1. Stop the U.S. from building new generations of nuclear weapons and downsize the vast existing American arsenal, while launching global negotiations to work toward the elimination of all such arsenals. The U.S. military is set to spend well over a trillion dollars in the coming decades to “modernize” its nuclear triad of bombers and land-based and submarine-launched missiles. Such a staggering “investment” can only move the world closer to nuclear Armageddon. If America is to lead by example when it comes to the ultimate power on this planet, why not begin by cancelling this trillion-dollar-nightmare as part of a new global anti-nuclear initiative? Why not commit us, long term, to the elimination of all nuclear weapons everywhere, while moving to adopt a “no-first-use” policy?

2. When it comes to President Biden’s commitment to slow climate change and clean up the environment, why not do something in military terms? America’s armed forces have an enormous appetite for fossil fuels. The Pentagon also has a sordid record when it comes to the poisoning of the environment. (Consider the legacy of Agent Orange in Vietnam, or the military’s burn pits in Iraq and Afghanistan, or the birth defects and severe health problems that were linked to the munitions its forces used in assaulting the Iraqi city of Fallujah in 2004.) If the president wants to set an example when it comes to demilitarizing this over-armed, over-polluted planet of ours, reducing both the military’s fossil-fuel emissions and its poisonous munitions would be a powerful way to start.

3. End this century’s forever wars and radically downsize this country’s unprecedented global network of military bases. Driving the colossal size of today’s military is what my old service, the Air Force, likes to call its “global reach, global power” mission. At least in theory, that mission, in turn, helps justify the sprawling network of 800 or so overseas bases, a network that costs more than $100 billion a year to maintain. Such bases not only consume resources needed here in the U.S. and help stoke those forever wars, but they present high-value targets to opponents and incite ill-feeling and resistance from “host” countries. So, downsizing that global base structure would be an act of peace — and fiscal sanity.

4. Make major cuts in the country’s war budget. Fewer bases and fewer or no wars should translate into a far lower defense budget. Somewhere in the neighborhood of $400 billion annually to defend this country and cover its real “national security” interests seems reasonable for the self-styled lone superpower. The money saved (roughly $340 billion based on this year’s budget) could then perhaps be partly rebated directly to American families in need in this pandemic. Perhaps every American family earning less than $50,000 a year could see a rebate on their taxes directly attributable to downsizing that budget and America’s imperial footprint overseas. Taking a page from Donald Trump, President Biden, as America’s thrifty and giving commander-in-chief, could even have his name put on those rebate checks. Call it a long-delayed peace dividend. Regular Americans, after all, need such “dividends” far more than giant defense contractors like Boeing or Raytheon. And don’t get me started on the need to invest in rebuilding this nation’s infrastructure at a moment when the extremities associated with climate change threaten to devastate parts of the country.

5. Create a Department of Peace (here’s looking at you, Dennis Kucinich) with influence at least approaching that of the so-called Department of Defense. Currently, the U.S. military is all about power projection, domination of the global battlespace, and similar buzzwords that add up to exporting violence abroad, special op by special op, drone by drone. You are what you do and the U.S. military does permanent war with plenty of “collateral damage.” (Picture mutilated black and brown bodies and flattened and poisoned cities and towns.) If the U.S. government can create a Space Force just to fulfill the fantasies of Donald Trump, then why not a peace force, too? (America’s current, humble Peace Corps asked for $401 million for Fiscal Year 2021, roughly the cost of four underperforming F-35 jet fighters.) Peace, much like war, doesn’t just happen. You have to work at it — and that would be precisely the mission of the Department of Peace.

6. Pay attention, for once, to President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s 1961 farewell address and exert rigorous oversight and zealous control over the military-industrial complex. That means ending the 2001 AUMF, the authorization for use of military force that Congress passed in a climate of panic and revenge in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 (though it was only to be against those associated in some fashion with those terror attacks), and the second one Congress authorized in 2002 in preparation for the Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq. They have been misused and abused by presidents ever since. Furthermore, end any conflict that hasn’t been authorized by a direct Congressional declaration of war. That means withdrawing all U.S. troops from Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, and elsewhere across the Greater Middle East and Africa. America’s security is not, in fact, directly threatened by those countries. As a self-declared democracy, the United States should set an example by not fighting wars disconnected from the people’s will and the true needs of national defense.

7. And speaking of President Eisenhower, America needs to embrace his lesson that military spending represents a theft from Americans who are hungry, sick, and need help. For its “national security,” this country needs more hospitals, better education, safer food, a cleaner environment, and, most of all, clean water and fresh air. Eisenhower knew that warships and warplanes were simply not the answer to the American people’s real and pressing needs.

8. Reject threat inflation, including the heightening talk of a “new cold war” with Russia or China or of an ongoing “generational” war on terror. Eliminate talk of a new Red Menace, of likely wars with Iran or North Korea, or of America’s backwardness in cyberwarfare research and development. Terrorism is nothing new and will always be with us in one form or another (including, vis-a-vis the Capitol on January 6th, domestic terrorism). Indeed, since war is terror, a war on terror should truly be considered an oxymoron. Terrorist acts are mostly the recourse of the weak when taking on the strong. The United States isn’t going to stop them by getting stronger yet. Nor are China and Russia about to invade this country. (This isn’t Red Dawn.) Iran is not coming to impose Sharia law and North Korea is not about to launch nukes against us. As for cyber-attacks, don’t worry: no matter what you’ve heard, no country does cyberwarfare better than the U.S.A.

9. End the practice of foreign aid taking the form of military aid. When taxpayers give aid to foreign countries, it should be in the form of food, medicine, and other essentials, not cluster bombs, F-16s, and Hellfire missiles.

10. Learn from Abraham Lincoln. In President Biden’s recent Inaugural Address, as a call to national unity, he made reference to Lincoln’s initial inaugural appeal to “the better angels of our nature.” But he should have focused on Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address, the finest speech ever given by any president. As Lincoln put it then, when it came to ending the American Civil War:

 

With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation’s wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan — to do all which may achieve and cherish a just, and lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations.

Lincoln was unafraid of speaking of and seeking a just and lasting peace. In this century, until at least the Trump years, Americans often heard their leaders speak of this nation’s “exceptional” nature. What could be more exceptional, more laudable, than seeking a lasting global peace?

Biden, like me, is Roman Catholic. My Catholic bible (Matthew 5:9) tells me that Christ said, “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called children of God.” Instead of beseeching God to protect the troops that American presidents have continually sent into harm’s way, Joe Biden might ask for blessings for America’s peace activists. To echo Lincoln again, that would indeed be a case of right making might, instead of the might-making-right vision that a militaristic America has grown far too comfortable with.

An alert and knowledgeable citizenry So long ago, President Eisenhower spoke of the importance of having an “alert and knowledgeable citizenry.” Isn’t it time for mainstream media outlets to foster real, critical, investigative journalism that would truly inform those very citizens about America’s wanton military spending and endless wars, while providing educators with crucial material to teach their students about the horrific costs of militarism? This country needs to free its collective mind from the prevailing forever-war narrative. To paraphrase Crosby, Stills, and Nash, if we teach the children well, perhaps they won’t repeat their father’s hell.

In his song “Imagine,” John Lennon asked us all to imagine a different world and said that it’s easy if you try. Lennon got the first and most important part right, but the second part sadly doesn’t apply, at least to this country in this century. Nowadays, Americans are so immersed in a culture driven by war, profit, and exploitation that it’s no longer easy to imagine anything but war. If Americans truly paid attention to war, up close and as personal as they could get, they’d begin to grasp the folly and wickedness of it and so perhaps relinquish what I’ve come to think of as their prisoner-of-war mentality in relation to it. They might actually begin breaking down mental barriers to peace.

Don’t count on Congress doing it, though. Congress is incestuously part of what should be renamed the military-industrial-congressional complex. Don’t count on the military doing it either. Its most senior men and women have been carefully selected, groomed, and promoted because they believe in the system, which includes incessant lobbying for more weaponry and exaggerating the threats to this country to get it. They exist to wage war; the rest of us should be willing to fight for peace.

Change, if and when it comes, will have to be driven by people like us.

It won’t be easy, but it is necessary for America’s survival. And it’s unlikely to come without campaign finance reform and the public funding of elections. In a “pay-to-play” oligarchy disguised as a democracy, the giant weapons-making corporations simply pay much more than you do and so speak through megaphones, leaving you with a dead mic. Unless the corporate dominance of our politics is curtailed, ordinary Americans will continue to be outshouted and overwhelmed by the bellicose and the greedy, leaving the country forever at war.

It won’t be easy to work for peace, but it sure is worth the try. It sure as hell beats the alternative of guns, bombs, and missiles being produced like so many sausages in a militaristic country that ever more resembles George Orwell’s nightmarish image of the future as “a boot stamping on a human face — forever.”

America’s new president has called for us to lead with the power of our example rather than just the example of our power. I can’t think of anything more exemplary and powerful than a strong commitment to making war no more.

William Astore, a retired lieutenant colonel (USAF) and professor of history, writes regularly for TomDispatch (where this article originated). He is a senior fellow at the Eisenhower Media Network (EMN), an organization of critical veteran military and national security professionals. His personal blog is Bracing Views.

Copyright ©2021 William Astore — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 02 February 2021

Word Count: 2,210

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Joe Biden’s got a problem — and so do I. And so, in fact, do we.

At 76 years old, you’d think I’d experienced it all when it comes to this country and its presidencies. Or most of it, anyway. I’ve been around since Franklin D. Roosevelt was president. Born on July 20, 1944, I’m a little “young” to remember him, though I was a war baby in an era when Congress still sometimes declared war before America made it.

As a boy, in my liberal Democratic household in New York, I can certainly remember singing (to the tune of “Whistle While You Work”) our version of the election-year ditty of 1956 when President Dwight D. Eisenhower faced off against Democratic nominee Adlai Stevenson. The pro-Republican kicker to it went this way: “Eisenhower has the power, Stevenson’s a jerk.” We, however, sang, “Eisenhower has no power, Stevenson will work!” As it happened, we never found out if that was faintly true, since the former Illinois governor got clobbered in that election (just as he had in 1952).

I certainly watched at least some of the 1960 televised debates between Eisenhower’s vice president, Richard Nixon, and John F. Kennedy — I was 16 then — that helped make JFK, at 43, the youngest president ever to enter the Oval Office. I can also remember his ringing Inaugural Address. We youngsters had never heard anything like it:

[T]he torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans — born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace, proud of our ancient heritage — and unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of those human rights to which this nation has always been committed, and to which we are committed today at home and around the world… Ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country.

While a college freshman at Yale, I saw him give a graduation speech in New Haven, Connecticut. From where I was standing, he was as small as one of the tiny toy soldiers I played with on the floor of my room in childhood. It was, nonetheless, a thrill. Yes, he was deeply involved in ramping up the war in Vietnam and America’s global imperial presence in a fiercely contested “Cold War.” Most of us teens, however, were paying little attention to that, at least until October 1962, in what came to be known as the Cuban Missile Crisis, when he addressed us on the radio, telling us that Soviet missile sites were just then being prepared on the island of Cuba with “a nuclear strike capability against the Western Hemisphere.” As a generation that grew up ducking-and-covering under our school desks in nuclear-attack drills, young Americans everywhere, my 18-year-old-self included, imagined that the moment might finally have arrived for the nuclear confrontation that could have left our country in ruins and us possibly obliterated. (I can also remember sitting in a tiny New Haven hamburger joint eating a 10-cent — no kidding! — burger just over a year later when someone suddenly stuck his head through the door and said, “The president’s been assassinated!”)

And I can recall, in the summer of 1964, hitchhiking with a friend across parts of Europe and trying, rather defensively, to explain to puzzled and quizzical French, Italian, and German drivers the candidacy of right-wing Republican Senator Barry Goldwater, who was running against Kennedy’s vice president and successor Lyndon B. Johnson. Goldwater was the Trump of his moment and, had I been in the U.S., I wouldn’t have given him the time of day. Still, as an American in Europe I felt strangely responsible for the weirder political aspects of my country and so found myself doing my damnedest to explain them away — perhaps to myself as much as to anyone else. In fact, maybe that was the secret starting point for TomDispatch, the website I would launch (or perhaps that would launch me) just after the 9/11 attacks so many years later.

The coming of a “presidential dictatorship” Although I never saw Lyndon Johnson in person, I did march through clouds of tear gas in Washington, D.C., to protest the bloody and disastrous conflict — the original “quagmire war” — that he continued to fight in Vietnam to the last Vietnamese, Laotian, and Cambodian. By then, as I was growing up, presidencies already seemed to be growing down and starting to look ever grimmer to me. And of course, as we all now know, there was far worse to come. After all, Johnson at least had reasonably forward-looking domestic policies in an age in which economic inequality was so much less rampant and the president and Congress could still accomplish things that mattered domestically — and not just for the staggeringly richest of Americans.

On the other hand, Richard Nixon, like Goldwater, a “southern strategy” guy who actually won the presidency on his second try, only ramped the Vietnam War up further. He also plunged his presidency into a corrupt and criminal netherworld so infamously linked to Watergate. And I once saw him, too, in person, campaigning in San Francisco when I was a young journalist. I sat just rows away from the stage on which he spoke and found myself eerily awed by the almost unimaginable awkwardness of his gestures, including his bizarrely unnatural version of a triumphant V-for-what-would-indeed-prove-to-be-victory against antiwar Democratic candidate George McGovern.

For Nixon, the V-for-defeat would come a little later and I would spend endless hours watching it — that is, the Watergate hearings — on an old black-and-white TV, or rather watching his imperial presidency come down around his ears. Those were the years when the Pentagon Papers, that secret trove of internal government documents on Vietnam war-making by successive White Houses, were released to the New York Times by Daniel Ellsberg. (His psychiatrist’s office would later be burgled by Nixon’s “plumbers” and he would play a key role in the fall of the house of Nixon.)

It was in those same years that former Kennedy aide and “court historian” Arthur Schlesinger wrote the book he classically titled The Imperial Presidency. And it was then, too, that Senator William Fulbright described the same phenomenon in his book The Crippled Giant, this way:

Out of a well-intended but misconceived notion of what patriotism and responsibility require in a time of world crisis, Congress has permitted the president to take over the two vital foreign policy powers which the Constitution vested in Congress: the power to initiate war and the Senate’s power to consent or withhold consent from significant foreign commitments. So completely have these two powers been taken over by the president that it is no exaggeration to say that, as far as foreign policy is concerned, the United States has joined the global mainstream; we have become, for purposes of foreign policy — and especially for purposes of making war — a presidential dictatorship.

Amen. And so it largely remains.

The executive order Keep in mind that those were still the good-old days before George W. Bush launched his own imperial war on significant parts of the planet with the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, based only on an open-ended, post-9/11 congressional Authorization for Use of Military Force. That first AUMF and a second one passed a year later would then be cited by the presidents to follow, whether to “surge” in Afghanistan or drone assassinate an Iranian leader at Baghdad International Airport. Congress declare war? You mean Congress have anything (other than endlessly funding the Pentagon) to do with the mess that an American world of warfare has created?

So, before Donald Trump ever left The Apprentice, the presidency had already become an imperial one on the world stage. Meanwhile, Congress and the White House could still work together domestically, but just in Republican (or in the case of Bill Clinton, Republican-style) administrations largely to further the yawning gap between the 1% of wealthy Americans and everyone else.

Otherwise, especially in the Obama years (when Mitch McConnell took control of the Senate in all his oppositional splendor), the imperial presidency began to gain a new domestic face thanks to executive orders. What little Barack Obama could do once the Republicans controlled Congress would largely be done through those executive orders, a habit that would be inherited big time by Donald Trump. On entering office, he and his crew would promptly begin trying to wipe out Obama’s legacy (such as it was) by executive orders and similar actions.

Trump’s presidency would certainly be the most bizarrely “imperial” of our time, as he and his team worked, executive act by executive act, to essentially burn the planet down, destroy the environment, lock Americans in and everyone else out, and dismantle the country’s global economic role. And in the end, in the most imperially incoherent way imaginable, with Republican congressional help, Trump would come at least reasonably close to rather literally destroying the American democratic system (“fake election“!) in the name of his own reelection.

It couldn’t have been more bizarre. Today, in a country experiencing the Covid-19 pandemic like no other and with a Congress so evenly split that you can almost guarantee it will get next to nothing done, any president who wanted to accomplish anything would have little choice but to be imperial. So who could be surprised that Joe Biden launched his presidency with a flurry of executive actions (30 of them in his first three days), mainly in the Trumpian style — that is, taken to reverse the previous executive actions of The Donald).

Grandpa Joe I doubt it’s happenstantial that the vibrantly imperial, yet still domestically democratic, country that elected the young John F. Kennedy would, 60 years later, elect a 78-year-old to replace a 74-year-old in the White House. Joe Biden will, in turn, join forces with the 80-year-old Democratic Speaker of the House of Representatives, while butting heads with the 78-year-old Minority Leader of the Senate to “run” a country that hasn’t been able to win a war since 1945, a pandemic nation of such staggering inequality as to be nothing short of historic.

As a senator who arrived in Washington just as Watergate was unfolding, Joe Biden presented himself as the opposite of the corrupt Nixon and so an opponent of an imperial presidency. And as he recently claimed in a phone conversation with the PBS News Hour‘s David Brooks, he’s still evidently not a fan of it. And yet in a Congress unlikely to do much of anything, including convicting the previous president of incitement to insurrection, what choice does he have? The way has been paved and he’s already on that ever-wider imperial road to… well, history suggests that it’s probably hell.

Joe Biden may not believe in the imperial presidency, but it could be all he has. Congress is in disarray; the courts, stacked with Mitch McConnell conservatives, will be against much of whatever he does; and those wars launched by George W. Bush and now spread disastrously across significant parts of the Greater Middle East and Africa are anything but over.

Yes, Donald Trump was a nightmare. Still, as I wrote years ago, he was always the mosquito, not the virus. I think it tells you something, thinking back to the vibrant 43-year-old John Kennedy in 1960, that Americans, with the worst outbreak of Covid-19 on the planet, would choose to elect a former vice president who was an exceedingly familiar old man. In our moment of crisis, we have grandpa in the White House.

And yet what could be more striking than a country, not so long ago considered the planet’s “lone superpower,” its “indispensable nation,” that simply can’t stop fighting distant and disastrous wars, while supporting its military financially in a way that it supports nothing else? As it happens, of course, the “costs” of those wars have indeed come home and not just in terms of a “Green Zone” in Washington or veterans assaulting the Capitol. It’s come home imperially, believe it or not, in the very form of Grandpa Joe.

Joe Biden is a decent man, acting in the early days of his presidency in decent ways. He’s anything but Donald Trump. Yet that may matter less than we imagine. The odds are, hesitant as I am to say it, that what we face may not prove to be an imperial presidency but an imperial-disaster presidency, something that could leave Presidents Johnson, Nixon, and crew in the shade.

At 76 — almost as old, that is, as our new president — I fear that Donald Trump was just our (particularly bizarre) introduction to imperial disaster. We now live on a distinctly misused planet in a country that looks like it could be going to the dogs.

As I said when I began this piece, Joe Biden has a problem (what a problem!) and so do I. So do we all. We could be heading into American territory where no one of any age has been before.

Tom Engelhardt created and runs the website TomDispatch.com (where this article originated). He is also a co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of a highly praised history of American triumphalism in the Cold War, The End of Victory Culture. A fellow of the Type Media Center, his sixth and latest book is A Nation Unmade by War.

Copyright ©2021 Tom Engelhardt — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 01 February 2021

Word Count: 2,165

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This month’s insurrection at the Capitol revealed the dismal failure of the Capitol Police and the Department of Defense to use their expertise and resources to thwart a clear and present danger to our democracy. As the government reform group Public Citizen tweeted, “If you’re spending $740,000,000,000 annually on ‘defense’ but fascists dressed for the renaissance fair can still storm the Capitol as they please, maybe it’s time to rethink national security?”

At a time of acute concern about the health of our democracy, any such rethinking must, among other things, focus on strengthening the authority of civilians and civilian institutions over the military in an American world where almost the only subject the two parties in Congress can agree on is putting up ever more money for the Pentagon. This means so many in our political system need to wean themselves from the counterproductive habit of reflexively seeking out military or retired military voices to validate them on issues ranging from public health to border security that should be quite outside the military’s purview.

It’s certainly one of the stranger phenomena of our era: after 20 years of endless war in which trillions of dollars were spent and hundreds of thousands died on all sides without the U.S. military achieving anything approaching victory, the Pentagon continues to be funded at staggering levels, while funding to deal with the greatest threats to our safety and “national security” — from the pandemic to climate change to white supremacy — proves woefully inadequate. In good times and bad, the U.S. military and the “industrial complex” that surrounds it, which President Dwight D. Eisenhower first warned us about in 1961, continue to maintain a central role in Washington, even though they’re remarkably irrelevant to the biggest challenges facing our democracy.

These days, it’s completely normal for military and defense officials to weigh in endlessly on what once would have been civilian matters. As the Biden years begin, it’s time to give some serious thought to how to demilitarize our democracy.

Unfortunately, in the America of 2021, the short-term benefit of relying on the widely accepted credibility of military figures to promote policies of every sort is obvious indeed. Who in the political class in the nation’s capital wouldn’t want a stamp of approval from dozens of generals, active or retired, endorsing their favorite initiative or candidate? (It’s something in years past the authors of this piece have been guilty of as well.) As it happens, though, such approval comes at a high price, undermining as it does the authority of civilian officials and agencies, while skewing resources toward the Pentagon that should be invested elsewhere to keep us truly safe.

It’s an essential attribute of the American system that the military remains under civilian authority. These days, however, given the number of current or retired military officers who have become key arbiters of what we should do on a dizzying array of critical issues, civilian control is the policy equivalent of an endangered species.

In the last election season, long before the attack on the Capitol, there was already an intense national discussion about how to prevent violence at the polls, a conversation that all too quickly (and disturbingly) focused on what role the military should play in the process. General Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was repeatedly asked to provide assurances that it would have no role in determining the outcome of the election, something that in another America would have been a given.

Meanwhile, some actually sought more military involvement. For example, in a widely debated “open letter” to Milley, retired Army officers John Nagl and Paul Yingling stated that “if Donald Trump refuses to leave office at the expiration of his constitutional term, the United States military must remove him by force, and you must give that order.” Proposals of this sort undermine the integrity of the many laws Congress and the states have put in place to prevent the military or armed vigilantes from playing any role in the electoral process.

Similarly, both former President Donald Trump and President Joe Biden have identified the military as a key future player in distributing the Covid-19 vaccine, something that could and should be handled by public-health institutions, if only they, like the Pentagon, had adequate resources.

The military knows best? During and after the attack on the Capitol, officials from the military and national security worlds were given pride of place in discussions about the future of our democracy. Their opinions were sought out by the media and others on a wide range of issues that fell well outside their primary areas of expertise. A letter from 10 former secretaries of defense calling on the Republican caucus to respect the results of the election was given headline attention, while political figures pressed to have retired military officers involved in the January 6th assault tried in military, not civilian, courts.

Before pursuing the second impeachment of Donald Trump, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi typically turned to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs (who isn’t even in the civilian chain of command) to seek assurance that he could stop the president from starting a last-minute nuclear war. And none of this was faintly unusual, given that retired military officers have regularly been asked to weigh in on subjects as varied as abortion rights, climate change, and childhood obesity. It’s not, of course, that such figures shouldn’t be able, like anyone else, to offer their opinions or support on matters of public health and safety, but that their voices shouldn’t matter more than those of public-health experts, scientists, medical professionals, or other civilians.

Despite its failure to win a war in decades, the military remains one of America’s most respected institutions, getting the kind of appreciation that generally doesn’t extend to other more successful public servants. After almost 20 years of forever wars, it’s hard, at this point, to accept that the military’s reputation for wisdom is deserved. In fact, continually relying on retired generals and other present or former national security officials as validators effectively erodes the credibility of, and the public’s trust in, other institutions that are meant to keep us healthy and safe.

In the Covid-19 moment, it should be clear that relying on narrowly defined notions of national security harms our democracy, a subject that none of those military or former military figures are likely to deal with. In addition, in all too many cases, current and retired military officials have abused the public trust in ways that call into question their right to serve as judges of what’s important, or even to imagine that they could provide objective advice. For one thing, a striking number of high-ranking officers on leaving the military pass through the infamous revolving door of the military-industrial complex into positions as executives, lobbyists, board members, or consultants for the defense industry. They work on behalf of firms like Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and General Dynamics that receive a combined $100 billion annually in Pentagon contracts with little accountability, even as they remain key go-to media figures.

They then use their former rank and the prestige attached to it to lobby Congress and influence the media on the need for endless wars and an ever-increasing military budget to support major weapons programs like Lockheed Martin’s troubled F-35 Joint Strike Fighter — all without bothering to disclose that they stand to gain financially from the positions they’re taking. And the prospect of a big, fat salary in the weapons sector upon retirement also exerts an unhealthy influence on officers still serving in the military who are often loath to anger, or in any way alienate, their potential future employers.

This revolving-door phenomenon is widespread. A study by the Project on Government Oversight found that, in 2018 alone, there were 645 cases in which the top 20 defense contractors hired former government officials, military officers, members of Congress, and senior congressional legislative staff as lobbyists, board members, or executives. This should hardly inspire public trust in their opinions.

In some cases, ex-military officers have even taken to the airwaves and the op-ed pages of newspapers to advocate for war without disclosing their ties to the arms industry. A 2008 New York Times investigation, for example, revealed that a number of retired-officers-turned-media pundits with continuing defense industry ties had, for years, advocated for the Iraq War at the Pentagon’s behest. Ex-generals like former Trump administration Defense Secretary James Mattis, who served on the board of General Dynamics before taking the helm of the Pentagon and returned there shortly after stepping down, too often use their stature to refrain from providing basic information to the media while befogging the transparency and accountability that should be a pillar of democracy.

The politicization of the military When civilian voices and policies are eclipsed as the central determinants in how our democracy should operate, a larger dilemma arises: continuing to rely on the military as a primary source of judgment for what’s right or wrong in the civilian world risks politicizing the armed forces, too. From retired Lieutenant General Michael Flynn leading chants of “Lock her up!” at the 2016 Republican National Convention to the competition between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump as well as, in the 2020 election campaign, between Joe Biden and Donald Trump to see who could get more retired generals to endorse him or her only helps militarize the civilian election process and politicizes what should be a nonpartisan institution.

Given the more than a trillion dollars Americans annually invest in the national security state, it’s striking to note, for instance, how such institutions let us down when it came to addressing the threats of white nationalism. Last summer, the Intercept uncovered a buried FBI report on the shortcomings of various federal agencies when it came to dealing with domestic terrorism. Before the 2020 election, the bureau refused to release that report on the domestic threat of white supremacy. Last year, in a similar fashion, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) withheld for months its assessment of the same “lethal” threat of racist extremism in this country.

While there must be a full investigation of what happened at the Capitol on January 6th, reports seem to indicate a striking blindness in the national security state to the possibility of such an attack. It’s not that the DHS, the FBI, or the military need an influx of new funds to face the problem. Rather, what’s needed at this moment in history is a clearer focus on the real risks to our country, which have little to do with foreign terrorists, the Taliban, or other such groups the U.S. has been fighting abroad for years on end. The Department of Defense typically did itself and the rest of us no favors by burying a report on widespread racism in the ranks of the military, which, though completed in 2017, didn’t see the light of day until this January. Only in the aftermath of the riot at the Capitol did that organization finally begin to truly address its own white-supremacy problems.

The military, like so many other American institutions, has failed to reckon seriously with deep-seated racism in its ranks. Even before the January 6th insurrection, it was clear that such racism made it nearly impossible for Black officers to be promoted. And while many questioned the naming of key military bases after Confederate generals, the issue has only recently been addressed (over a presidential veto at that) with the creation of a new commission to rename them. Reports of active duty, reserve, and veteran members of the military aiding the Capitol insurrection only bring into stark relief the inexcusable costs of not having addressed the problem earlier.

More Pentagon spending won’t make us safer There are also high costs to be paid for relying on the Department of Defense to handle problems that have nothing to do with its primary mission. Using the armed forces as key players in addressing crises that aren’t military in nature only further undermines civilian institutions and is often counterproductive as well.

In the initial stages of the Covid-19 pandemic, a number of politicians called for President Trump to use the Defense Production Act (as it seems Biden will indeed soon do) and the Department of Defense to ramp up the production of N95 masks, ventilators, and other personal protective equipment. The story of what happened to such funds in the Trump years should be telling. The Washington Post discovered that $1 billion in supposed pandemic relief money was instead funneled directly to defense contractors and $70 million of the funds the Pentagon spent went to ventilators that proved unfit for Covid-19 patients. While some of that money did go to bolster mask supply chains, another Post investigation discovered that such efforts did not come close to addressing national shortfalls and amounted to less than the department spends on instruments, uniforms, and travel for military bands.

Perhaps the most disturbing cost of our overreliance on the military can be found in Congress’s budget and policy priorities. In December of last year, a bill to authorize nearly $740 billion in Pentagon spending garnered enough votes to easily overcome President Trump’s veto (motivated mainly by his refusal to condone renaming military bases named after Confederate generals) at the very moment when Congress was blocking legislation to give $2,000 relief checks directly to Covid-19 embattled Americans.

By now, two decades into the twenty-first century, it’s clear that more money for the Pentagon hasn’t made this country safer. It has, however, helped give the military an ever more central role in our previously civilian political world. Biden’s selection of retired General Lloyd Austin III to be secretary of defense only emphasizes this point. While it’s certainly laudatory to appoint the first Black leader to that position, Austin has retired so recently that he needed a congressional waiver from a law requiring a seven-year cooling off period before taking up such a civilian post (just as Mattis did four years ago) — another sign that civilian control of the military is continuing to weaken. In addition, now that he has retired from his role in private industry, Austin stands to make a small fortune, up to $1.7 million, when he divests his stock holdings in Raytheon Technologies.

“In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex,” President Eisenhower warned Americans in his 1961 farewell address. How right he proved to be! Sixty years later, it’s become all too clear that more must be done to deal with that very “unwarranted influence.” The immediate crises of the American republic should be clear enough right now: responding to the pandemic and restoring our civilian democracy. Certainly, military leaders like Milley should be appreciated for agreeing on the need to prioritize the pandemic and oppose sedition. However, more Pentagon spending and more military influence will not, in the end, make us any safer.

Mandy Smithberger writes regularly for TomDispatch (where this article originated). She is the director of the Center for Defense Information at the Project On Government Oversight (POGO). William D. Hartung, also a TomDispatch regular, is the director of the Arms and Security Project at the Center for International Policy and the author of Prophets of War: Lockheed Martin and the Making of the Military-Industrial Complex.

Copyright ©2021 Mandy Smithberger and William Hartung — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 28 January 2021

Word Count: 2,501

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After four years of Donald Trump’s fitful tenure, America is awakening from a long, troubled sleep to discover, like the fictional character Rip Van Winkle, that the world it once knew has changed beyond all recognition.

In that classic American tale by Washington Irving published in 1819, an amiable but shiftless farmer strolls out of his colonial village to go hunting in the Catskill Mountains. There he happens upon a group of mysterious men, drinks deep from their keg of liquor, and falls into a long sleep. He awakens to find that he’s grown a white beard down to his belly and his youth has withered into an unrecognizable old age. Walking back to the village, he discovers his wife is long dead and their house in ruins. Meanwhile, the sign above the village pub where he whiled away so many pleasant hours no longer bears the face of his beloved King George, the British monarch, but has been replaced by someone named General Washington. Inside, the convivial chatter of colonial days has given way to fervid electioneering for something called Congress, whatever that might be. Incredibly, Rip Van Winkle had slept right through the American Revolution.

While this country was similarly sleepwalking through the fever dream of President Donald Trump’s version of America First, the world kept changing as decisively as it did during those seven years when General Washington’s Continentals fought the British Redcoats. Just as King George suffered a searing defeat that cost him the 13 colonies, so the United States has, with similarly stunning speed, now lost its leadership of the international community.

Whose world island is it? During the eight years before Donald Trump took office in 2017, the U.S. seemed to be adapting creatively to some serious challenges to its post-Cold War global hegemony. After the 2007-2008 financial crisis, the worst since the Great Depression, a bipartisan stimulus program saved the nation’s auto industry and launched a slow but sustained economic recovery.

Fueled by renewed economic vitality, Washington seemed to have a reasonable shot at checking China’s all too real and growing global economic challenge. After all, using the $4 trillion in foreign exchange reserves it had earned by 2014 from its new role as the world’s workshop, Beijing had launched a trillion-dollar Belt and Road Initiative focused on making the vast Eurasian landmass (and parts of Africa) into an integrated trade zone — a veritable “world island” that would exclude America and so radically undercut its global leadership.

In his two terms as president, Barack Obama, Trump’s predecessor, pursued a clever countervailing strategy, seeking to split Beijing’s potential world island economically at its continental divide in the Ural Mountains. Obama’s planned Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), which pointedly excluded China, was the keystone to his strategy for drawing Asia’s trade toward America, thereby rendering that Belt and Road Initiative a hollow shell. That draft treaty, which would have surpassed any other economic alliance except the European Union, was designed to integrate the economies of 12 Pacific basin nations that generated 40% of gross world product — and the U.S. was to be at the very heart of it.

To drain commerce away from the other half of Beijing’s would-be world island, Obama was also pursuing negotiations for a Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership with the European Union. Its combined $18 trillion economy was already the world’s largest, accounting for 20% of gross world product. The proposed regulatory alignment between Europe and the United States would supposedly have added $260 billion to their total annual trade. Obama’s bold grand strategy was to use those two pacts to beggar Beijing’s plans by giving the U.S. preferential access to 60% of the world economy.

Of course, Obama’s effort was encountering strong headwinds even before he left office. In Europe, an opposition coalition of 170 civil society groups protested that the treaty would transfer control over the regulation of consumer safety, the environment, and labor from democratic states to closed corporate arbitration tribunals. In the U.S., Obama’s scheme faced sharp criticism even within the Democratic Party. Key figures like Senator Elizabeth Warren opposed the potential degradation of labor and environmental laws via the TPP. In the face of such strong criticism, Obama had to rely on Republican votes to win Senate approval for fast-track authority to complete the final round of negotiations over the treaty. That opposition, however, ensured that neither agreement would be approved before he left office.

It was, however, Donald Trump who delivered the coup de grâce. Right after his inauguration, he curtailed trade talks with Europe and withdrew from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, saying: “We’re going to stop the ridiculous trade deals that have taken… companies out of our country, and it’s going to be reversed.”

Unilateral foreign policy Trump would instead adopt a unilateral America First strategy that soon sparked a costly trade war with China. After two years of escalating tariffs on both sides of the Pacific that damaged the U.S. economy, Trump capitulated in January 2020, signing an agreement that rescinded the most prohibitive U.S. duties in exchange for Beijing’s unenforceable promise to buy more American goods. The president then hailed his “big, beautiful” trade deal as a great victory, even though it was nothing less than an ill-concealed surrender.

While his White House seemed obsessed with gaming its bilateral ties with China, Beijing was stealing a page right out of Obama’s strategic global playbook, outmaneuvering Washington by pursuing two multilateral trade agreements that should have seemed eerily familiar to anyone who lived through the Obama years. In November 2020, Beijing would lead 15 Asia-Pacific nations in signing a Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership that promised to create the world’s largest free-trade zone, encompassing 2.2 billion people and nearly a third of the global economy.

Just a month later, China’s President Xi Jinping scored what one expert called “a geopolitical coup” by signing a landmark agreement with European Union leaders for the closer integration of their financial services. In effect, the accord gives European banks easier access to the Chinese market, while drawing the continent more closely into Beijing’s orbit. So serious is the shift away from Washington that President Biden’s incoming National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan publicly urged the NATO allies to first consult with the new administration before signing onto the deal — a plea they simply ignored. Indeed, this treaty is arguably the biggest breach in the NATO alliance since that mutual defense pact was formed more than 70 years ago.

Through a stunning inversion of Obama’s bold yet unrealized geopolitical gambit of using multilateral pacts to draw Eurasia’s trade toward America, those two agreements will give China preferential access to nearly half of all world trade (without even factoring in the still-developing Belt and Road project). In a diplomatic masterstroke, Bejing exploited Trump’s absence from the international arena to negotiate agreements that could, along with that Belt and Road Initiative, steer a growing share of the Eurasian continent’s capital and commerce toward China. In the years to come, Beijing’s inclusiveness could well mean Washington’s exclusion from much of the burgeoning trade that will continue to make Eurasia the epicenter of global economics.

The decline and fall of you-know-which great power If that were all, then we could chalk up a few significant wins for China and just wait for Biden’s foreign-policy team to try to even the score. But there’s far more happening that suggests those treaties were a clear manifestation of deeper, more troubling trends.

When empires decline and fall, they seldom collapse in the sort of sudden apocalypse portrayed in a monumental series of paintings entitled “The Course of Empire” by another denizen of the Catskill Mountains, the renowned artist Thomas Cole. His 1836 painting in that series, now appropriately enough hung at the Smithsonian Museum in Washington, shows a “savage enemy” plundering a grand imperial capital whose inhabitants, debased by years of luxurious living, can only flee in terror while women are raped and buildings burn.

Empires, however, usually experience a long, less dramatic decline before they fall in the Roman fashion, thanks to events whose logic only becomes apparent years or even decades later, as historians try to sort through the rubble. So it’s likely to be in what, until mid-last week, was (and still in many ways remains) Donald Trump’s America, where the signs of decline are as erratic as they are omnipresent.

The most telling harbinger of that decline, Trump himself, is now in exile at his Mar-a-Lago Club in Florida. Ten years ago in an essay for TomDispatch entitled Four scenarios for the end of the American Century by 2025, I suggested that U.S. global hegemony would end not with Thomas Cole’s apocalyptic bang, but instead with the whimper of empty populist rhetoric. “Riding a political tide of disillusionment and despair,” I wrote in December 2010, “a far-right patriot captures the presidency with thundering rhetoric, demanding respect for American authority and threatening military retaliation or economic reprisal. The world pays next to no attention as the American Century ends in silence.”

Trump’s election in 2016 made all too real what, until then, had only seemed to me a troubling possibility. With a legerdemain worthy of that nineteenth-century showman P.T. Barnum’s bag of bunkum (like the supposed Cardiff Giant or the Fiji Island Mermaid), Trump’s TV show “The Apprentice” presented The Donald as a self-made billionaire of extraordinary financial savvy. Who better to rescue America from the job losses, stagnant wages, and foreign competition brought on by economic globalization? But Trump had cheated his way into an Ivy League college; many of his businesses had gone bankrupt; and his much-vaunted entrepreneurial flair came down essentially to frittering away a $400 million inheritance from his father. As journalist H.L. Mencken predicted back in 1920, America had finally come to the point where “the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”

Once in office, Trump soon bent the nation (but not the world) to his will, rupturing time-tested alliances, tearing up treaties, denying incontrovertible climate science, and demanding respect for American authority with a thundering, if largely empty, rhetoric that threatened military retaliation or economic reprisals globally. Despite his manifestly inane policies, the Republican Party capitulated, corporate tycoons applauded, and nearly half the American public cleaved to their new-found savior.

As with all sell-out shows, the best was saved for last. When the Covid-19 pandemic struck with full force in March 2020, Trump turned up at the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) in Atlanta, donning a MAGA hat, to proclaim his “natural ability” when it came to medical science, while distinguished doctors stood by like studio extras in mute testimony to his otherwise risible claims. As the pandemic began climbing toward its terrible, still developing toll, Trump hijacked White House briefings by medical experts to promote a succession of crackpot claims — wearing a mask was merely “politically correct”; Covid-19 was just another flu that “becomes weaker with warmer weather”; hydroxychloroquine was a cure; and shining ultraviolet “light inside of the body” or injecting “disinfectant” were possible treatments. A surprising number of Americans started drinking bleach to protect themselves from the virus, forcing months of public-health warnings.

After nearly a century in which the United States had been a world leader in promoting public health, the Trump administration, to escape blame for its own escalating failures, walked out of the World Health Organization. Lending the country the aura of a failed state, the CDC itself, once the world’s gold standard in medical research, bungled the development of a coronavirus test and so forfeited any serious, nationwide attempt to successfully track and trace the disease (the most effective means of its control).

While smaller nations like New Zealand, South Korea, and even impoverished Rwanda effectively curbed Covid-19, by the end of Trump’s term the U.S. already had experienced more than 400,000 deaths and 24 million infections — significantly above any other developed nation and a full quarter of the world’s total cases. Meanwhile, Beijing mobilized a rigorous public-health campaign that quickly contained the virus to just 4,600 deaths in a population of 1.4 billion. In only four months, China virtually eliminated the virus (despite periodic new local breakouts) and had its economy humming along with a 5% increase in gross domestic product, which accounted for 30% of global growth last year. Meanwhile, after 11 months of an incessant pandemic, the U.S. remained mired in a crippling recession. This striking disparity in state performance only accelerated China’s quest to surpass the U.S. as the world’s largest economy and, with all that financial clout, become its preeminent power.

A tragicomic encore It was, however, President Trump’s bid for an encore that would prove truly extraordinary when it came to imperial decline. During its 70 years as a global hegemon, Washington’s public promotion of democracy has been the signature program that has helped legitimate its global leadership (no matter the CIA-style interventions it launched or the colonial-style wars it continually fought).

While the Cold War often compromised that commitment in particularly striking ways, following its end Washington has spent 30 years officially promoting fair voting and democratic transitions, with leaders like former president Jimmy Carter flying off to capitals on five continents to oversee and encourage free elections. Suddenly, the world watched in slacked-jaw amazement as, on January 6th on the White House ellipse, the president denounced a fair American election as fraudulent and sent a mob of 10,000 white nationalists, QAnon conspirators, and other Trumpsters off to storm the Capitol where Congress was ratifying the transition to a new administration.

Adding to this failed-state aura, the country’s once-formidable national security apparatus crumpled like a Third World constabulary as right-wing militia men breached the frail security cordon around the Capitol and stormed its halls as if they were a lynch mob hunting for congressional leaders. House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer’s desperate calls to a dawdling Pentagon and Maryland Governor Larry Hogan’s dangerously delayed mobilization of his state’s National Guard, caused by the U.S. military’s compromised chain of command, only seemed to echo the sort of tropical coup scenarios I witnessed in Manila, the capital of the Philippines, during the 1980s.

When Congress was finally back in session, the Capitol still rang with Republican calls, in the name of national unity, for forgetting what the president had incited. In that way, Republican congressional representatives seemed to echo the kind of impunity that has long protected fallen military juntas in Asia or Latin America from any accounting for their countless crimes. This attempt, in other words, to perpetuate a would-be autocrat’s power through a (failed) coup was the sort of spectacle that many millions living in Asia, Africa, and Latin America have experienced in their own fragile states but never expected to see in America.

Suddenly, our supposedly exceptional nation seemed tragically ordinary. The shimmering dome of the Capitol once symbolized the vitality of this nation’s democracy, inspiring others to follow its principles or at least acquiesce to its power. This country now looks tattered and tired, caught like others before it between forgetting in the name of unity or demanding the powerful be held accountable for high crimes that will otherwise haunt the nation. Instead of aspiring to America’s ideals or entrusting their security to its power, many nations will likely find their own way forward, cutting deals with all comers, starting with China.

Despite an aura of overwhelming strength, empires, even ones as powerful as America’s, often prove surprisingly fragile and their decline regularly comes far sooner than anyone could have imagined — particularly when the cause is not Thomas Cole’s “savage enemy” but their own self-destructive instincts.

Today, in the era of a 78-year-old president, a veritable Rip Van Biden, Americans and the rest of the world are, it seems, waking up in a new age. It could well be a daunting one.

 

Alfred W. McCoy writes regularly for TomDispatch (where this article originated). He is the Harrington professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the author of The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade, the now-classic book which probed the conjuncture of illicit narcotics and covert operations over 50 years, and most recently In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power (Dispatch Books).

Copyright ©2021 Alfred McCoy — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 26 January 2021

Word Count: 2,654

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“I got out of the Marines and within a few years, 15 of my buddies had killed themselves,” one veteran rifleman who served two tours in both Afghanistan and Iraq between 2003 and 2011 said to me recently. “One minute they belonged and the next, they were out, and they couldn’t fit in. They had nowhere to work, no one who related to them. And they had these PTSD symptoms that made them react in ways other Americans didn’t.”

This veteran’s remark may seem striking to many Americans who watched this country’s post-9/11 wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere unfold in an early display of pyrotechnic air raids and lines of troops and tanks moving through desert landscapes, and then essentially stopped paying attention. As a co-founder of Brown University’s Costs of War Project, as well as a military spouse who has written about and lived in a reasonably up-close-and-personal way through the costs of almost two decades of war in the Greater Middle East and Africa, my Marine acquaintance’s comments didn’t surprise me.

Quite the opposite. In the sort of bitter terms I’m used to, they only confirmed what I already knew: that most of war’s suffering doesn’t happen in the moment of combat amid the bullets, bombs, and ever-more-sophisticated IEDs on America’s foreign battlefields. Most of it, whether for soldiers or civilians, happens indirectly, thanks to the way war destroys people’s minds, its wear and tear on their bodies, and what it does to the delicate systems that uphold society’s functioning like hospitals, roads, schools, and most of all, families and communities that must survive amid so much loss.

Combat deaths: the tip of the iceberg A major task of the Costs of War Project has been to document the death toll among uniformed American troops from our post-9/11 wars, especially in Afghanistan and Iraq. Compared to the 400,000 American deaths (and still climbing) from Covid-19 in less than a year, the approximately 7,000 American military deaths from those wars over almost two decades seem, if anything, small indeed (though, of course, that total doesn’t include thousands of military contractors who also fought and died on the American side). Even for me, as an activist and also a psychotherapist who bears witness to human suffering on a fairly regular basis, it’s easy enough to grow desensitized to the words “more than 7,000,” since my life hasn’t been threatened by combat daily.

Indeed, 7,000 is a small number compared not just to Covid-19 deaths here but to the 335,000-plus deaths of civilians in our war zones since 2001. It doesn’t even measure up to the 110,000 (and counting) Iraqi, Afghan, and other allied soldiers and police killed in our wars. However, 7,000 isn’t so small when you think about what the loss of one life in combat means to the larger circle of people in that person’s community.

To focus only on the numbers of American combat deaths ignores two key issues. First, every single combat death in Iraq and Afghanistan has ripple effects here at home. As the wife of a submarine officer who has completed four sea tours and who, as a Pentagon staffer, has had to deal with war’s carnage in detail, I’ve been intimately involved in numerous communities grieving over military deaths and sustaining wounds years after the bodies have been buried. Parents, spouses, children, siblings, and friends of soldiers who have been killed in action live with survivor’s guilt, depression, anxiety, and sometimes addiction to alcohol or drugs.

Families, many with young children, struggle to pay the rent, purchase food, or cover healthcare premiums and copays after losing the person who was often the sole source of family income. Communities have lost workers, volunteers, and neighbors at a time of mass illness and unrest just when we need those who can sustain intense pressure, problem solve, and work across class, party, and racial lines — in other words, our soldiers. (And yes, while the storming of the Capitol earlier this month included military veterans, I have no doubt that the majority of U.S. troops and veterans would prefer to be shot before getting involved in such a nightmare.)

Second, as the testimony of the former Marine I interviewed suggests, many people suffer and die long after the battles they fought in are over. Social scientists still know very little about the magnitude of deaths because of — but not in — war’s battles. Still, a 2008 study by the Geneva Declaration Secretariat estimated that indirect deaths from war are at least four times as high as deaths sustained in combat.

At the Costs of War Project, we’ve started to examine the effects of war on human health and mortality, particularly in America’s war zones. There, people die in childbirth because hospitals or clinics have been destroyed. They die because there are no longer the doctors or the necessary equipment to detect cancer early enough or even more common problems like infections. They die because roads have been bombed or are unsafe to travel on. They die from malnutrition because farms, factories, and the infrastructure to transport food have all been reduced to rubble. They die because the only things available and affordable to anesthetize them from emotional and physical pain may be opioids, alcohol, or other dangerous substances. They die because the healthcare workers who might have treated them for, or immunized them against, once obsolete illnesses like polio have been intimidated from doing their work. And of course, as is evident from our own skyrocketing military suicide rates, they die by their own hands.

It’s very hard to count up such deaths, but as a therapist who works with U.S. military families and people who have emigrated from dozens of often war-torn countries around the world, the mechanisms by which war creates indirect death seem all too clear to me: you find that, in the post-war moment, you can’t sleep, let alone get through your day, without debris on the highway, a strange look from someone, or an unexpected loud noise outside sparking terror.

If the stress hormones coursing through your body don’t wreak their own havoc in the form of painful chronic illnesses like fibromyalgia or mental illnesses like depression and anxiety, then the methods you use to cope like overeating, reckless driving, or substance abuse, very well might. If you are a child or the spouse of someone who has lived through repeated deployments to America’s twenty-first-century wars, then there’s a significant chance you’ll be on the receiving end of physical violence from someone who lacks the tools and self-control to deal peacefully. We aren’t counting or even describing such injuries and the deaths that can sometimes result from them, but we do need to find a way.

A gaping hole in our knowledge My colleagues and I have started to examine the indirect costs of war through interviews with people who have born witness to war or lived through it, as has the U.S. government through its own limited collection of statistics. For example, in 2018, some 18 American active-duty military personnel or veterans died by suicide each day. (Yes, daily.) But all we really know so far is this: self-inflicted deaths from violence, car accidents, substance abuse, and chronic stress that can be traced back to this country’s post-9/11 wars are problems that plague military communities, and they didn’t exist at this magnitude before Washington decided to respond to the 9/11 attacks by invading Afghanistan and then Iraq.

Still, we have remarkably little information about the scope and nature of such problems. I’ll tell you what I do know with certainty, though: the only consistent and cohesive institutions sustaining troops home from America’s battle zones are the “families,” formal and informal, of servicemembers and the communities in which they live — not just their spouses and children, but also extended families, neighbors, and friends. When it comes to the more formal support structures — Veterans Affairs hospitals and outpatient clinics, providers that accept military insurance, small nonprofits that provide recreational and other forms of support and the like — there just aren’t enough of them.

It’s common knowledge in my community that referral processes and wait times for such aid are often long and stressful. If you’re a veteran seeking help, it’s likely that you’ll find yourself having to switch doctors more than once a year, rather than getting the continuity of care you might need to treat complex physical and emotional trauma. Meanwhile, childcare and other kinds of supportive caregiving that might help control neglect and abuse are laughably sparse.

As the upper-middle-class wife of an officer in a family that enjoys the benefit of dual incomes, I can still offer examples from my own life and community that should raise questions about how someone with fewer resources and already under the stress that accompanies multiple “tours” of America’s battle zones can survive. My husband and I had to pull years’ worth of retirement savings from our bank account to afford a lifesaving prenatal treatment for me that military insurance would not then fund (though it would indeed be covered later) — a problem that could have been avoided had the customer service representatives of the Department of Defense’s health and medical program, Tricare, been appropriately funded and trained.

The wife of an officer we know whose son has autism had to go through months of letter-writing and advocacy to receive care both for that boy and her other young child so she could apply for jobs and travel to her own medical appointments during her husband’s multiple deployments. (Tricare would only fund care for one child, leaving her watching the other.) Active-duty and veteran servicemembers I know regularly drink and use drugs heavily each night to calm their anxieties and post-traumatic stress symptoms sufficiently to sit through family dinners, watch our ever-more-distressing news, or get a few hours of sleep.

Many fear seeking mental-health treatment because of the real threat that, in the military, exposure for doing so will result in professional demotion. We live in an era where so much depends on competent, trustworthy security to shield us from the dual threats of a deadly pandemic and domestic terrorism and yet our security forces often lead lives that are problematic indeed. The toll in such lives — what might be thought of as indirect deaths from combat — that we’ve endorsed by failing to welcome home and provide adequately for the some two million servicemembers who have fought in “our” wars should be a focus of our attention and yet is largely unnoticed.

A defense bill that defends little With such human costs of war in mind, it’s a wonder to me that the only bipartisan bill passed by Congress over a presidential veto in the Trump years was the recent monumentally funded $740 billion “defense” bill. It included spending for yet more weapons production, as well as salary raises, among other measures that were meant to shore up the fighting power of our active-duty troops (after 19-plus years of unsuccessful wars abroad).

Most striking to me, however, amid its massive support for the military-industrial complex, is how little that bill does to expand social support for military families. There is indeed a modest increase in daycare assistance for troops’ family members with disabilities, as well as limits to increased copays for those who use their military insurance in their communities. Missing totally, however, are key structural changes like protections for soldiers who seek mental healthcare, more robust job-training programs for those desiring to transition into the civilian workforce, greater accountability for Tricare when it comes to providing accurate information on services available in the community, and expanded childcare support for military families.

Indeed, what’s most notable about that bill’s very existence is how the leaders of both political parties keep funding war spending above all else, especially given that our foreign wars of this century have accomplished little of discernible value beyond making a mess that may never be cleaned up. To me, what that bill truly represented was the massive and unseen costs of America’s post-9/11 wars at home and abroad.

It seems that we Americans still care more about waging war in distant lands than about protecting our own people right here at home. Indirect deaths from our conflicts are a reality, however little noticed they may be. Isn’t it time to begin weaving a genuine safety net, allowing vulnerable Americans who fought in those very wars to be better supported so that, no longer committing senseless violence against others, they don’t commit it on themselves?

Andrea Mazzarino writes regularly for TomDispatch (where this article originated). She co-founded Brown University’s Costs of War Project. She has held various clinical, research, and advocacy positions, including at a Veterans Affairs PTSD Outpatient Clinic, with Human Rights Watch, and at a community mental health agency. She is the co-editor of War and Health: The Medical Consequences of the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Copyright ©2021 Andrea Mazzarino — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 25 January 2021

Word Count: 2,094

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