When the pundit corps expressed worry, wrongly, about Bernie Sanders and the rise of quote-unquote socialism in the Democratic Party, Congressman Jim Clyburn said son, please. Black voters know white voters better than white voters know themselves. By the time the primaries are done with Iowa and New Hampshire, Black pragmatists in South Carolina are going to seal Joe Biden’s fate. Clyburn was right. First, Biden won the nomination. Then he won more votes than any candidate in US history.

Though we owe Clyburn a debt, no one’s perfect. Within a day or so of Election Day, the House Whip was out front again. Why did the Democrats lose seats in the House instead of gaining them, as expected? I think, more than anyone else, Clyburn can be blamed for the conventional wisdom that arose that day. The reason, he said, was quote-unquote socialism and all the messaging that arose from it. Largely thanks to Clyburn, the Democrats are now acting like losers, instead of the winners they are.

Then something peculiar happened. The same man who blamed quote-unquote socialism for the loss of House seats was talking up the champion of quote-unquote socialism. On CNN, Clyburn actually said that, “There are a lot of young people out there and some not-so-young people, like Bernie Sanders. I wish he would come into the administration. Bernie has a way of getting people to understand certain things.”

What’s going on here? On the one hand, you could say Clyburn meant it when he blamed quote-unquote socialism for the unexpected loss of House seats, but carved out an exception for an old friend even though he’s a quote-unquote socialist. On the other hand, maybe Clyburn didn’t mean it. Maybe he was searching for answers to hard questions like everyone does after an election.

Maybe he was just being competitive. The party’s progressive wing is rising. An oldster like Clyburn might not get what all the youngsters are talking about, but recognizes rivals when he sees them. The apparent conflict between competing wings of the Democratic Party, then, is probably not over quote-unquote socialism. It is probably over normal intra-party politics.

Remember that the Democrats were united against Donald Trump. It’s natural, then, for unity to loosen up after a giant is slain. (Republican incumbents are indeed giants.) It’s natural, moreover, for the various factions that united against a common foe to start jockeying for position postmortem, doing whatever they can, for as long as they can, to influence legislative affairs and achieve their respective goals.

Sanders is not going to be in Biden’s administration, because his place in the Senate is too valuable. But it’s nonetheless normal for him to say, as he did last month, that he and his progressive supporters are going to hold the Biden administration “accountable.”

It’s healthy for Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and others to say, as they did this week, that they oppose the appointment of “deficit hawks.” They are reminding the president-elect that he owes “the left,” and that “the left” has expectations.

Healthy intra-party politics can become unhealthy. The Democrats are, however, a long way from where the Republicans were a decade ago when billionaire donors really did build an “alt-right” hierarchy of power to primary conventional Republicans out of existence.

They are a long way from where the GOP is now — when people like former House Speaker Newt Gingrich accuse Georgia Democrats of voter fraud while worrying that such claims might deter Republican voters from turning out for that state’s runoff elections next month. (The outcomes will determine which party controls the Senate.)

I’m not saying the Democrats won’t ever cannibalize themselves. I’m saying that reports of their self-cannibalization are, thus far, greatly exaggerated.

It probably won’t ever happen, though. Consider the different ways the parties handle disagreement. For the Democrats, disagreement is expected. Independence of thought is valued. The party is a big tent. Lots of competing opinions, lots of competing goals. The trick is finding ways to balance them and move all factions forward at the same time.

For the Republicans, disagreement is unexpected. Independence of thought is suspect. It suggests disloyalty. Loyalty matters above all. When Republicans disagree publicly, that’s newsworthy. It signals weakness. When Democrats disagree publicly, that’s newsworthy, too. But it’s not weakness that’s being signaled. It’s strength.

Republicans self-destruct at the sight of dissent. The Democrats, however, don’t.

The Washington press corps, alas, doesn’t quite get this. It doesn’t fit into its amoral and two-dimensional view that the parties are equally bad and equally good. For this reason, lots of normal people, even liberals, end up accusing the Democrats of being terrible communicators. “Why can’t they get on message?” is a question I hear often. Even some Democrats appear to accept the charge as true, judging themselves not according to their considerable strength, but according to the Republicans’ weakness.

The result is making something healthy and normal, like intra-party rivalries, seem unhealthy and dangerous, like the rise of quote-unquote socialism. After four years of nonstop lying, the least the Democrats can do is speak truthfully about themselves.

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 25 November 2020

Word Count: 848

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The US government “ascertained” Joe Biden’s victory on Monday night. That means the president-elect can get on with the business of building a new administration. The move came after Emily Murphy, the head of the General Services Administration, found the political cover she needed to authorize his transition team.

Donald Trump has not yet conceded, but in permitting a peaceful transfer, a source told the Washington Post, “He basically just conceded. That’s as close to a concession as you will probably get.”

It’s Murphy’s “political cover” that we should be talking about. I don’t mean that she should have done what she was supposed to have done according to her sworn oath and without fear of betraying her patron in the White House. I’m referring, instead, to an argument already underway over whether “the system worked.”

On the one hand are the alarmists, like me — Trump is attempting a coup d’etat!

On the other hand are the skeptics. In this, the LA Times’ David Lauter is representative: “So far, predictions of [election] catastrophe have fallen flat: No violence, no huge lines, no big problems with USPS, nor mass numbers of voters with ballot errors. No efforts by GOP legislatures to interfere. Just Rudy with hair dye dripping down his face. Whimper, not bang.”

I’m not going to conclude which one is correct. I am going to argue that the answer to question of whether “the system worked” is probably going to be found somewhere in Murphy’s understanding of “political cover.” Different people can define “the system” in different ways, of course, but everyone should agree that Murphy, as head of the GSA, is one of its critical cogs.

We must look, therefore, at the forces culminating in her decision — on Friday, she said that partisan loyalties were no longer sustainable. I can’t touch on them all, obviously, but I can single out one: federalism. That’s the idea that shaped the founders’ thinking, and therefore, their framing of our system of government.

The best way of preventing tyrants from accumulating the power they desire, the founders believed, was building a structure by which power is decentralized and redundant. Most recall the separation of powers at the federal level — the executive, legislative, and judicial branches. Some forget power is also split 50 ways, with each of the states having power, each county within each of the states having power, and each municipality within each county within each of the states having power. All of this is highly inefficient, but inefficiency was the point. The United States is sovereign, but so are its moral, legal and constitutional components.

I think federalism was central to the creation of Murphy’s “political cover.” The president’s legal scheme for usurping the will of the people was running out of gas last week. That much was apparent. In state courts, the evidentiary standard is by necessity higher than it is in the court of public opinion. Baseless assertions are punishable by law.

Even as Trump’s attorneys alleged widespread systemic voter fraud in front of television cameras (primarily Fox), they could not make the same allegations in front of judges. Over time, one lawsuit after another was getting tossed out of court. By the middle of the week, Trump knew that gambit was doomed. That’s why he changed tactics. He tried getting election officials and state lawmakers to crown him king.

That, too, ran into trouble. State election officials are bound by state law. (It is a felony in Michigan, for instance, for a member of the state board of canvassers to refuse to certify votes.) State legislators are doubly bound, you could say — by the law and by politics. Trump wanted GOP lawmakers in Michigan to assign their own slate of electors in order to usurp the will of the people. But that risked legal jeopardy. More importantly, that risked a fruitless court battle with a Democratic administration with the legal authority to assign electors (who were also bound by the law). Trump wasn’t just asking them to side with him. He was asking them to commit political suicide.

The outcome in Michigan has been clear since last week. A group of CEOs said Monday morning Trump must end his 16-day stand-off with the republic. So did a group of GOP national security types. So did a handful of Republican Senators. By Monday afternoon, Michigan certified its votes. That gave Biden the electoral votes he needed. (Pennsylvania and Nevada certified their votes today). That gave Murphy the cover she needed. That is, federalism did — it established a reality the Republicans, including Murphy, could no longer deny. She “ascertained” Biden’s victory that night.

Federalism didn’t save us by itself. If Biden’s margins of victory had been narrower in Michigan, and elsewhere, I have no doubt the Republicans would have stood by while the president and his attorneys found perfectly legal ways of stealing the election. To the extent that federalism saved us, it was subordinate to the integrity of principled leaders (like Georgia’s beleaguered Republican secretary of state) and to the historic turnout on the part of American citizens who took matters into their own hands.

We must have faith in democratic institutions. Our “system,” even if it “worked,” is in desperate need of reform. For now, however, let’s celebrate having faith in ourselves.

 

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 24 November 2020

Word Count: 885

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Let’s open up and sing, and ring the bells out
Ding-dong! the merry-oh sing it high, sing it low
Let them know the wicked witch is dead!

Within establishment circles, Donald Trump’s failure to win re-election has prompted merry singing and bell-ringing galore. If you read the New York Times or watch MSNBC, the song featured in the 1939 movie The Wizard of Oz nicely captures the mood of the moment.

As a consequence, expectations for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris to put America back on the path to the Emerald City after a dispiriting four-year detour are sky high. The new administration will defeat Covid-19, restore prosperity, vanquish racism, reform education, expand healthcare coverage, tackle climate change, and provide an effective and humane solution to the problem of undocumented migrants. Oh, and Biden will also return the United States to its accustomed position of global leadership. And save America’s soul to boot.

So we are told.

That these expectations are deemed even faintly credible qualifies as passing strange. After all, the outcome of the 2020 presidential election turned less on competing approaches to governance than on the character of the incumbent. It wasn’t Joe Biden as principled standard-bearer of enlightened twenty-first-century liberalism who prevailed. It was Joe Biden, a retread centrist pol who emerged as the last line of defense shielding America and the world from four more years of Donald Trump.

So the balloting definitively resolved only a single question: by 80 million to 74 million votes, a margin of six million, Americans signaled their desire to terminate Trump’s lease on the White House. Yet even if repudiating the president, voters hardly repudiated Trumpism. Republicans actually gained seats in the House of Representatives and appear likely to retain control of the Senate.

On November 3rd, a twofold transfer of power commenced. A rapt public has fixed its attention on the first of those transfers: Biden’s succession to the presidency (and Trump’s desperate resistance to the inevitable outcome). But a second, hardly less important transfer of power is also occurring. Once it became clear that Trump was not going to win a second term, control of the Republican Party began reverting from the president to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. The implications of that shift are immense, as Biden, himself a longtime member of the Senate, no doubt appreciates.

Consider this telling anecdote from former President Barack Obama’s just published memoir. Obama had tasked then-Vice President Biden with cajoling McConnell into supporting a piece of legislation favored by the administration. After Biden made his pitch, the hyper-partisan McConnell dourly replied, “You must be under the mistaken impression that I care.” End of negotiation.

Perhaps the Democrats will miraculously win both Senate seats in Georgia’s January runoff elections and so consign McConnell to the status of minority leader. If they don’t, let us not labor under the mistaken impression that he’ll support Biden’s efforts to defeat Covid-19, restore prosperity, vanquish racism, reform education, expand healthcare coverage, tackle climate change, or provide an effective and humane solution to the problem of undocumented migrants.

It’s a given that McConnell isn’t any more interested in saving souls than he is in passing legislation favored by Democrats. That leaves restoring American global leadership as the sole remaining arena where President Biden might elicit from a McConnell-controlled GOP something other than unremitting obstructionism.

And that, in turn, brings us face to face with the issue Democrats and Republicans alike would prefer to ignore: the U.S. penchant for war. Since the end of the Cold War and especially since the terror attacks of 9/11, successive administrations have relied on armed force to assert, affirm, or at least shore up America’s claim to global leadership. The results have not been pretty. A series of needless and badly mismanaged wars have contributed appreciably — more even than Donald Trump’s zany ineptitude — to the growing perception that the United States is now a declining power. That perception is not without validity. Over the past two decades, wars have depleted America’s strength and undermined its global influence.

So, as the U.S. embarks on the post-Trump era, what are the prospects that a deeply divided government presiding over a deeply divided polity will come to a more reasoned and prudent attitude toward war? A lot hinges on whether Joe Biden and Mitch McConnell can agree on an answer to that question.

An unexpected gift for “Sleepy Joe” As his inevitable exit from the White House approaches, President Trump himself may be forcing the issue.

One of the distinctive attributes of our 45th president is that he never seemed terribly interested in actually tending to the duties of his office. He does not, in fact, possess a work ethic in any traditional sense. He prefers to swagger and strut rather than deliberate and decide. Once it became clear that he wasn’t going to win a second term, he visibly gave up even the pretense of governing. Today, he golfs, tweets, and rails. According to news reports, he no longer even bothers to set aside time for the daily presidential intelligence briefing.

As the clock runs out, however, certain Trumpian impulses remain in play. The war in Afghanistan, now in its 19th year, offers a notable example. In 2001, President George W. Bush ordered U.S. forces to invade the country, but prematurely turned his attention to a bigger and more disastrous misadventure in Iraq. Barack Obama inherited the Afghanistan War, promised to win it, and ordered a large-scale surge in the U.S. troop presence there. Yet the conflict stubbornly dragged on through his two terms. As for candidate Trump, during campaign 2016, he vowed to end it once and for all. In office, however, he never managed to pull the plug — until now, that is.

Soon after losing the election, the president ousted several senior Pentagon civilians, including Secretary of Defense Mark Esper, and replaced them (for a couple of months anyway) with loyalists sharing his oft-stated commitment to “ending endless wars.” Within days of taking office, new Acting Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller issued a letter to the troops, signaling his own commitment to that task.

“We are not a people of perpetual war,” he wrote, describing endless war as “the antithesis of everything for which we stand and for which our ancestors fought.” The time for accepting the inevitable had now arrived. “All wars must end,” he continued, adding that trying harder was not going to produce a better outcome. “We gave it our all,” he concluded. “Now, it’s time to come home.”

Miller avoided using terms like victory or defeat, success or failure, and did not specify an actual timetable for a full-scale withdrawal. Yet Trump had already made his intentions clear: he wanted all U.S. troops out of Afghanistan by the end of the year and preferably by Christmas. Having forgotten or punted on innumerable other promises, Trump appeared determined to make good on this one. It’s likely, in fact, that Miller’s primary — perhaps only — charge during his abbreviated tour of duty as Pentagon chief is to enable Trump to claim success in terminating at least one war.

So during this peculiar betwixt-and-between moment of ours, with one administration packing its bags and the next one trying to get its bearings, a question of immense significance to the future course of American statecraft presents itself: Will the United States at long last ring down the curtain on the most endless of its endless wars? Or, under the guise of seeking a “responsible end,” will it pursue the irresponsible course of prolonging a demonstrably futile enterprise through another presidency?

As Miller will soon discover, if he hasn’t already, his generals don’t concur with the commander-in-chief’s determination to “come home.” Whether in Afghanistan or Somalia, Iraq, Syria, or Europe, they have demonstrated great skill in foiling his occasional gestures aimed at reducing the U.S. military’s overseas profile.

The available evidence suggests that Joe Biden’s views align with those of the generals. True, the conduct and legacy of recent wars played next to no role in deciding the outcome of the 2020 presidential election (suggesting that many Americans have made their peace with endless war). Still, given expectations that anyone aspiring to high office these days must stake out a position on every conceivable issue and promise something for everyone, candidate Biden spelled out his intentions regarding Afghanistan.

Basically, he wants to have it both ways. So he is on record insisting that “these ‘forever wars’ have to end,” while simultaneously proposing to maintain a contingent of American troops in Afghanistan to “take out terrorist groups who are going to continue to emerge.” In other words, Biden proposes to declare that the longest war in U.S. history has ended, while simultaneously underwriting its perpetuation.

Such a prospect will find favor with the generals, members of the foreign policy establishment, and media hawks. Yet hanging on in Afghanistan (or other active theaters of war) will contribute nothing to Biden’s larger promise to “build back better.” Indeed, the staggering expenses that accompany protracted wars will undermine his prospects of making good on his domestic reform agenda. It’s the dilemma that Lyndon Johnson faced in the mid-1960s: You can have your Great Society, Mr. President, or you can have your war in Vietnam, but you can’t have both.

Biden will face an analogous problem. Put simply, his stated position on Afghanistan is at odds with the larger aspirations of his presidency.

At long last an exit strategy? As a practical matter, the odds of Trump actually ending the U.S. military presence in Afghanistan between now and his departure from office are nil. The logistical challenges are daunting, especially given that the pick-up team now running the Pentagon is made up of something other than all-stars. And the generals will surely drag their feet, while mobilizing allies not just in the punditocracy but in the Republican Party itself.

As a practical matter, Acting Secretary Miller has already bowed to reality. The definition of success now is, it seems, to cut the force there roughly in half, from 4,500 to 2,500, by Inauguration Day, with the remainder of U.S. troops supposedly coming out of Afghanistan by May 2021 (months after both Trump and Miller will be out of a job).

So call it Operation Half a Loaf. But half is better than none. Even if Trump won’t succeed in reducing U.S. troop strength in Afghanistan to zero, I’m rooting for him anyway. As, indeed, Joe Biden should be — because if Trump makes headway in shutting down America’s war there, Biden will be among the principal beneficiaries.

Whatever his actual motives, Trump has cracked open a previously shut door to an exit strategy. Through that door lies the opportunity of turning the page on a disastrous era of American statecraft dominated by a misplaced obsession with events in the Greater Middle East.

Twin convictions shaped basic U.S. policy during this period: the first was that the United States has vital interests at stake in this region, even in utterly remote parts of it like Afghanistan; the second, that the United States can best advance those interests by amassing and employing military power. The first of those convictions turned out to be wildly misplaced, the second tragically wrong-headed. Yet pursuant to those very mistaken beliefs, successive administrations have flung away lives, treasure, and influence with complete abandon. The American people have gained less than nothing in return. In fact, in terms of where taxpayer dollars were invested, they’ve lost their shirts.

Acting Secretary Miller’s charge to the troops plainly acknowledges a bitter truth to which too few members of the Washington establishment have been willing to admit: the time to move on from this misguided project is now. To the extent that Donald Trump’s lame-duck administration begins the process of extricating the United States from Afghanistan, he will demonstrate the feasibility of doing so elsewhere as well. Tired arguments for staying the course could then lose their persuasive power.

Doubtless, after all these disastrous years, there will be negative consequences to leaving Afghanistan. Ill-considered and mismanaged wars inevitably yield poisonous fruit. There will be further bills to pay. Still, ending the U.S. war there will establish a precedent for ending our military involvement in Iraq, Syria, and Somalia as well. Terminating direct U.S. military involvement across the Greater Middle East and much of Africa will create an opportunity to reconfigure U.S. policy in a world that has changed dramatically since the United States recklessly embarked upon its crusade to transform great swathes of the Islamic world.

Biden himself should welcome such an opportunity. Admittedly, Mitch McConnell, no longer fully subservient to President Trump, predicts that withdrawing from Afghanistan will produce an outcome “reminiscent of the humiliating American departure from Saigon in 1975.” In reality, of course, failure in Vietnam stemmed not from the decision to leave, but from an erroneous conviction that it was incumbent upon Americans to decide the destiny of the Vietnamese people. The big mistake occurred not in 1975 when American troops finally departed, but a decade earlier when President Johnson decided that it was incumbent upon the United States to Americanize the war.

As Americans learned in Vietnam, the only way to end a war gone wrong is to leave the field of battle. If that describes Trump’s intentions in Afghanistan, then we may finally have some reason to be grateful for his service to our nation. With time, Joe Biden and Mitch McConnell might even come to see the wisdom of doing so.

And then, of course, they can bicker about the shortest path to the Emerald City.

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.

Copyright ©2020 Andrew Bacevich — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 24 November 2020

Word Count: 2,271

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There’s a presumption at work among members of the Washington press corps that needs rethinking. That presumption is this: the Republicans, especially those in the Senate, fear the wrath of voters who have balled up their identities with the rise and fall of Donald Trump. For this reason, all the Republicans, with rare exception, stand in silence while the president prosecutes what must be called an attempted coup d’etat.

This presumption is part of a larger generational context in which political, economic and financial incentives are pursued amorally, wherever they might lead, even if they end up tearing into this or that social, ethical or democratic norm.

Shareholder value must be maximized. Profits must be realized. Voters must be obeyed. They must, even if they poison the water, ruin livelihoods or bring America to the brink of despotism.

This presumption is usually hard to spot. It’s found in and among the many rational-sounding reasons Republicans give for their continued support of the president. Sure, they might be complicit in the sabotage of the incoming administration, but what can they do? They must hold on to Trump’s voters in order to hold onto the Senate. (Two run-off elections in Georgia will determine which party controls the upper chamber.)

Importantly, these incentives are so fierce, they appear to give Republicans no choice.

The problem isn’t that incentives impact elected officials. Of course, they do. The problem is that reporters allow these incentives to seem monolithic — as if there were not, in fact, many equally important incentives to consider. The impression is one of Republicans merely doing what constituents demand. If it were up to them, they say, they would oppose Trump. It’s not up to them, so they don’t.

According to CNN’s Carl Bernstein, many Republicans Senators “have repeatedly expressed extreme contempt for Trump and his fitness to be” president. All of them are said to be scared to death.

Presumably, this is why Bernstein outed 21 of them on CNN’s “New Day.” They are too scared to stand up to Trump. The current crisis is too dire to keep their names hidden. So:

The 21 GOP Senators who have privately expressed their disdain (to Bernstein) for Trump are: (Rob) Portman, (Lamar) Alexander, (Ben) Sasse, (Roy) Blunt, (Susan) Collins, (Lisa) Murkowski, (John) Cornyn, (John) Thune, (Mitt) Romney, (Mike) Braun, (Todd) Young, Tim Scott, Rick Scott, (Marco) Rubio, (Chuck) Grassley, (Richard) Burr, (Pat) Toomey, (Martha) McSally, (Jerry) Moran, (Pat) Roberts, (and Richard) Shelby.

I think Bernstein hoped outing them would put more pressure on them to act in the best interest of the republic. But he may be giving more credit than is due. To repeat, there are many incentives to consider when it comes to the behavior of elected officials. Another incentive is the oath of office by which they vowed to defend and protect the Constitution against enemies foreign and domestic.

Trump cheated to win in 2016. He cheated again when he involved a foreign leader in a criminal conspiracy to defraud the American people. The case for the president’s removal was as clear as the outcome of the 2020 election. Very. Yet all the above Republicans acquitted Trump of treason.

But they were said to be afraid. They had to stand by him. OK, fine, but acquitting a traitor demands more than taking the GOP’s word for it. What’s so scary that they’re willing to, as political scientist Steven White said this morning, “debase themselves” for “a man who will throw them under the bus the second it seems beneficial to him.”

Dissent’s Richard Yeselson’s answer nailed it: “(It’s) always fascinating … how little ‘courage’ is really required. Nobody is going to the Gulag, nobody need rise up in the Warsaw Ghetto. Republicans are terrified of tweets, and afraid of, at worst, losing office. They are the most craven, contemptible governing class imaginable.”

So the problem is one of choices. The Republicans do not fear Trump. They fear losing power. They are, in intent and in effect, choosing power over principles, power over promises, and power over patriotism.

They could choose to explain for the good of the country that Trump should get out of the way. But they are choosing not to. We are left, then, with a reasonable conclusion: they believe sticking with Trump gives them an advantage over people who believe some things matter more than power.

Sticking with Trump gives them an advantage over those of us who believe in democracy. They say they are afraid in order to gain advantage over people of good faith who fall for it.

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 23 November 2020

Word Count: 764

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In this mystifying moment, the post-electoral sentiments of most Americans can be summed up either as “Ding dong! The witch is dead!” or “We got robbed!” Both are problematic, not because the two candidates were intellectually indistinguishable or ethically equivalent, but because each jingle is laden with a dubious assumption: that President Donald Trump’s demise would provide either decisive deliverance or prove an utter disaster.

While there were indeed areas where his ability to cause disastrous harm lent truth to such a belief — race relations, climate change, and the courts come to mind — in others, it was distinctly (to use a dangerous phrase) overkill. Nowhere was that more true than with America’s expeditionary version of militarism, its forever wars of this century, and the venal system that continues to feed it.

For nearly two years, We the People were coached to believe that the 2020 election would mean everything, that November 3rd would be democracy’s ultimate judgment day. What if, however, when it comes to issues of war, peace, and empire, “Decision 2020” proves barely meaningful? After all, in the election campaign just past, Donald Trump’s sweeping war-peace rhetoric and Joe Biden’s hedging aside, neither nuclear-code aspirant bothered to broach the most uncomfortable questions about America’s uniquely intrusive global role. Neither dared dissent from normative notions about America’s posture and policy “over there,” nor challenge the essence of the war-state, a sacred cow if ever there was one.

That blessed bovine has enshrined permanent policies that seem beyond challenge: Uncle Sam’s right and duty to forward deploy troops just about anywhere on the planet; garrison the globe; carry out aerial assassinations; and unilaterally implement starvation sanctions. Likewise the systemic structures that implement and incentivize such rogue-state behavior are never questioned, especially the existence of a sprawling military-industrial complex that has infiltrated every aspect of public life, while stealing money that might have improved America’s infrastructure or wellbeing. It has engorged itself at the taxpayer’s expense, while peddling American blood money — and blood — on absurd foreign adventures and autocratic allies, even as it corrupted nearly every prominent public paymaster and policymaker.

This election season, neither Democrats nor Republicans challenged the cultural components justifying the great game, which is evidence of one thing: empires come home, folks, even if the troops never seem to.

The company he keeps As the election neared, it became impolite to play the canary in American militarism’s coal mine or risk raising Biden’s record — or probable prospects — on minor matters like war and peace. After all, his opponent was a monster, so noting the holes in Biden’s block of Swiss cheese presumably amounted to useful idiocy — if not sinister collusion — when it came to Trump’s reelection. Doing so was a surefire way to jettison professional opportunities and find yourself permanently uninvited to the coolest Beltway cocktail parties or interviews on cable TV.

George Orwell warned of the dangers of such “intellectual cowardice” more than 70 years ago in a proposed preface to his classic novel Animal Farm. “At any given moment,” he wrote, “there is an orthodoxy… that all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but it is ‘not done’ to say it… Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness.”

And that’s precisely what progressive paragon Cornel West warned against seven months ago after his man, Senator Bernie Sanders — briefly, the Democratic frontrunner — suddenly proved a dead candidate walking. “Vote for Biden, but don’t lie about who he really is,” the stalwart scholar suggested. It seems just enough Americans did the former (phew!), but mainstream media makers and consumers mostly forgot about the salient second part of his sentiment.

With the electoral outcome now apparent — if not yet accepted in Trump World — perhaps such politeness (and the policing that goes with it) will fade away, ushering in a renaissance of fourth estate oppositional truth-telling. In that way — in my dreams at least — persistently energized progressives might send President Joe Biden down dovish alternative avenues, perhaps even landing some appointments in an executive branch that now drives foreign policy (though, if I’m honest, I’m hardly hopeful on either count).

One look at Uncle Joe’s inbound nieces and nephews brings to mind Aesop’s fabled moral: “You are judged by the company you keep.”

Think-tank imperialists  One thing is already far too clear: Biden’s shadow national security team will be a distinctly status-quo squad. To know where future policymakers might head, it always helps to know where they came from. And when it comes to Biden’s foreign policy crew, including a striking number of women and a fair number of Obama administration and Clinton 2016 campaign retreads — they were mostly in Trump-era holding patterns in the connected worlds of strategic consulting and hawkish think tanking.

In fact, the national security bio of the archetypal Biden bro (or sis) would go something like this: she (he) sprang from an Ivy League school, became a congressional staffer, got appointed to a mid-tier role on Barack Obama’s national security council, consulted for WestExec Advisors (an Obama alumni-founded outfit linking tech firms and the Department of Defense), was a fellow at the Center for New American Security (CNAS), had some defense contractor ties, and married someone who’s also in the game.

It helps as well to follow the money. In other words, how did the Biden bunch make it and who pays the outfits that have been paying them in the Trump years? None of this is a secret: their two most common think-tank homes — CNAS and the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) — are the second- and sixth-highest recipients, respectively, of U.S. government and defense-contractor funding. The top donors to CNAS are Northrop Grumman, Boeing, and the Department of Defense. Most CSIS largesse comes from Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and Raytheon.

How the inevitable conflicts of interest play out is hardly better concealed. To take just one example, in 2016, Michèle Flournoy, CNAS co-founder, ex-Pentagon official, and “odds-on favorite” to become Biden’s secretary of defense, exchanged emails with the United Arab Emirates (UAE) ambassador in Washington. She pitched a project whereby CNAS analysts would, well, analyze whether Washington should maintain drone-sales restrictions in a non-binding multilateral “missile technology control“ agreement. The UAE’s autocratic government then paid CNAS $250,000 to draft a report that (you won’t be surprised to learn) argued for amending the agreement to allow that country to purchase American-manufactured drones.

Which is just what Flournoy and company’s supposed nemeses in the Trump administration then did this very July past. Again, no surprise. American drones seem to have a way of ending up in the hands of Gulf theocracies — states with abhorrent human rights records that use such planes to surveil and brutally bomb Yemeni civilians.

If it’s too much to claim that a future defense secretary Flournoy would be the UAE’s (wo)man in Washington, you at least have to wonder. Worse still, with those think-tank, security-consulting, and defense-industry ties of hers, she’s anything but alone among Biden’s top prospects. Just consider a few other abridged resumes:

• Tony Blinken, frontrunner for national security adviser: CSIS; WestExec (which he co-founded with Flournoy); and CNN analyst.

• Jake Sullivan, a shoo-in for a “senior post in a potential administration”: the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (“peace,” in this case, being funded by 10 military agencies and defense contractors) and Macro Advisory Partners, a strategic consultancy run by former British spy chiefs.

• Avril Haines, a top contender for CIA director or director of national intelligence: CNAS-the Brookings Institution; WestExec; and Palantir Technologies, a controversial, CIA-seeded, NSA-linked data-mining firm.

• Kathleen Hicks, probable deputy secretary of defense: CSIS and the Aerospace Corporation, a federally funded research and development center that lobbies on defense issues.

An extra note about Hicks: she’s the head of Biden’s Department of Defense transition team and also a senior vice president at CSIS. There, she hosts that think tank’s “Defense 2020” podcast. In case anyone’s still wondering where CSIS’s bread is buttered, here’s how Hicks opens each episode:

“This podcast is made possible by contributions from BAE Systems, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and the Thales Group.”

In other words, given what we already know about Joe Biden’s previous gut-driven policies that pass for “middle of the road” in this anything but middling country of ours, the experiences and affiliations of his “A-Team” don’t bode well for systemic-change seekers. Remember, this is a president-elect who assured rich donors that “nothing would fundamentally change” if he were elected. Should he indeed stock his national security team with such a conflicts-of-interest-ridden crowd, consider America’s sacred cows of foreign policy all but saved.

Biden’s outfit is headed for office, it seems, to right the Titanic, not rock the boat.

Off the table: A paradigm shift In this context, join me in thinking about what won’t be on the next presidential menu when it comes to the militarization of American foreign policy.

Don’t expect major changes when it comes to:

• One-sided support for Israel that enables permanent Palestinian oppression and foments undying ire across the Greater Middle East. Tony Blinken put it this way: as president, Joe Biden “would not tie military assistance to Israel to things like annexation [of all or large portions of the occupied West Bank] or other decisions by the Israeli government with which we might disagree.”

• Unapologetic support for various Gulf State autocracies and theocracies that, as they cynically collude with Israel, will only continue to heighten tensions with Iran and facilitate yet more grim war crimes in Yemen. Beyond Michèle Flournoy’s professional connections with the UAE, Gulf kingdoms generously fund the very think tanks that so many Biden prospects have populated. Saudi Arabia, for example, offers annual donations to Brookings and the Rand Corporation; the UAE, $1 million for a new CSIS office building; and Qatar, $14.8 million to Brookings.

• America’s historically unprecedented and provocative expeditionary military posture globally, including at least 800 bases in 80 countries, seems likely to be altered only in marginal ways. As Jake Sullivan put it in a June CSIS interview: “I’m not arguing for getting out of every base in the Middle East. There is a military posture dimension to this as a reduced footprint.”

Above all, it’s obvious that the Biden bunch has no desire to slow down, no less halt, the “revolving door” that connects national security work in the government and jobs or security consulting positions in the defense industry. The same goes for the think tanks that the arms producers amply fund to justify the whole circus.

In such a context, count on this: the militarization of American society and the “thank-you-for-your-service” fetishization of American soldiers will continue to thrive, exhibit A being the way Biden now closes almost any speech with “May God protect our troops.”

All of this makes for a rather discouraging portrait of an old man’s coming administration. Still, consider it a version of truth in advertising. Joe and company are likely to continue to be who they’ve always been and who they continue to say they are. After all, transformational presidencies and unexpected pivots are historically rare phenomena. Expecting the moon from a man mostly offering Moon Pies almost guarantees disappointment.

Obama encore or worse? Don’t misunderstand me: a Biden presidency will certainly leave some maneuvering room at the margins of national security strategy. Think nuclear treaties with the Russians (which the Trump administration had been systematically tearing up) and the possible thawing of at least some of the tensions with Tehran.

Nor should even the most cynical among us underestimate the significance of having a president who actually accepts the reality of climate change and the need to switch to alternative energy sources as quickly as possible. Noam Chomsky’s bold assertion that the human species couldn’t endure a second Trump term, thanks to the environmental catastrophe, nuclear brinksmanship, and pandemic negligence he represents, was anything but hyperbole. Yet recall that he was also crystal clear about the need “for an organized public” to demand change and “impose pressures” on the new administration the moment the new president is inaugurated.

Yet, in the coming Biden years, there is also a danger that empowered Democrats in an imperial presidency (when it comes to foreign policy) will actually escalate a two-front New Cold War with China and Russia. And there’s always the worry that the ascension of a more genteel emperor could co-opt — or at least quiet — a growing movement of anti-Trumpers, including the vets of this country’s forever wars who are increasingly dressing in antiwar clothing.

What seems certain is that, as ever, salvation won’t spring from the top. Don’t count on Status-quo Joe to slaughter Washington’s sacred cows of foreign policy or on his national security team to topple the golden calves of American empire. In fact, the defense industry seems bullish on Biden. As Raytheon CEO Gregory Hayes recently put it, “Obviously, there is a concern that defense spending will go way down if there is a Biden administration, but frankly I think that’s ridiculous.” Or consider retired Marine Corps major general turned defense consultant Arnold Punaro who recently said of Biden’s coming tenure, “I think the industry will have, when it comes to national security, a very positive view.”

Given the evidence that business-as-usual will continue in the Biden years, perhaps it’s time to take that advice from Cornel West, absorb the truth about Biden’s future national security squad, and act accordingly. There’s no top-down salvation on the agenda — not from Joe or his crew of consummate insiders. Pressure and change will flow from the grassroots or it won’t come at all.

Danny Sjursen writes regularly for TomDispatch (where this article originated). He is a retired U.S. Army major, contributing editor at antiwar.com, and senior fellow at the Center for International Policy, directs the Eisenhower Media Network and cohosts the “Fortress on a Hill” podcast. A former history instructor at West Point, he served in Iraq and Afghanistan. His two books are Ghost Riders of Baghdad, and Patriotic Dissent: America in the Age of Endless War. Follow him on Twitter at @SkepticalVet.

Copyright ©2020 Danny Sjursen — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 23 November 2020

Word Count: 2,275

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I think some Republicans are beginning to sweat. Not like Rudy Giuliani sweltered during yesterday’s loony presser. (Whether it was spray-on hair dye or mascara running down his cheeks seems to be subject to debate.) But perspiration always starts slow. The more the president denies defeat, the more some Republicans will sweat bullets.

To be clear, I have no doubt, had Joe Biden’s margin of victory been narrower, that the Republicans would have stood by while Donald Trump successfully stole the election. He has followed a predictable plan: claim voter fraud, litigate outcomes in court, and, now, get Republican state electors to declare him His Holiness, the God-Emperor of the United States.

All of this will fail, but failing isn’t the point. The Republicans have demonstrated a dangerous tolerance for sedition. (That’s to be expected, I suppose, given GOP Senators acquitted Trump of treason, freeing him to commit it again.)

You could say, as Edward Foley did in the Washington Post, that democracy dies when “the losing party won’t accept defeat.” You could also say, with more accuracy and more urgency, that the losing party is killing something it no longer controls.

The Republicans now have a taste for coup d’etat. Every serious citizen is right to expect them to try again.

They must first get through this period, which will probably determine which future road the Republicans take. If Trump gets out of the way, they can move forward with preparations to sandbag Biden with their reputations for love of country and loyalty to the republic intact.

If the president doesn’t get out of the way, however, those preparations could, and should, unfold under a cloud of suspicion. Most people still don’t fully appreciate the depths of Trump’s sedition or the GOP’s complicity in it. The more he stays put, though, the more the press corps is going to raise public awareness.

Each day sees word-choice getting more forceful and strident. The Post: “Trump uses power of presidency to try to overturn the election and stay in office.”

Here’s the AP’s tweeted nut graf: “President Donald Trump is trying to turn America’s free and fair election into a muddled mess of misinformation, specious legal claims and baseless attacks on the underpinnings of the nation’s democracy.”

These are going to hurt.

Stuart Stevens, a former GOP strategist, said: “If pressuring state legislators to throw out an election and appoint loyal electors isn’t a high crime, what is? Does the Constitution mean nothing?”

Bloomberg’s Jonathan Bernstein said: “Trump has now gone from legitimately contesting the election to illegitimately attempting to steal it, and in the process he’s undermining confidence in democracy. People are threatening election officials trying to do their jobs, and Trump is putting pressure on Republican elected officials to join his unconstitutional scheming.”

Larry Sabato, a nonpartisan pollster, said: “Yep, it’s #sedition. Let’s hope the Secret Service and military leaders have a serious, detailed plan to remove all trespassers from the White House at noon on January 20.” (Fact: The Pentagon has made clear there is no plan to get involved.)

Importantly, the above are not marginal. Indeed, these are white men whose privilege, influence and status would probably insulate them from any fascist takeover. Yet here they are, rightly screaming from the ramparts. It’s not hard to imagine the press corps amplifying screams like theirs.

The last thing the GOP wants is for them to be so loud they play in Peoria. If most Americans start seeing the Republicans through the lens of betrayal, if they start seeing the party as a separatist movement (that’s what it is), even the milquetoastiest of Democrats, like Joe Manchin, will be forced to go to the wall.

Then there’s “moderates” like Mitt Romney. The Utah senator and former Republican presidential nominee understands his fellow Republicans are playing with fire. If the Republicans don’t hustle the president out the door, and soon, he’s going to enmesh the party in a fight with patriotism itself — a fight that Romney knows it cannot win.

Bear in mind, he tacitly compared Trump to Richard Nixon in last night’s statement:

 

Having failed to make even a plausible case of widespread fraud or conspiracy before any court of law, the President has now resorted to overt pressure on state and local officials to subvert the will of the people and overturn the election. It is difficult to imagine a worse, more undemocratic action by a sitting President.

If Trump were more of a team player, he’d recognize he’s put the Republicans in a good place. Millions of Americans already doubt Biden won. The Republican Senate, therefore, can proceed with sabotaging his administration under the guise of God and country but also in the spirit of exacting revenge for a former president done wrong.

But Trump isn’t a team player. He’s demanding state lawmakers humiliate themselves in his name, and so far, they are obliging. He’s reaching for loonier and loonier conspiracy theories, anything to prevent leaving office.

The Republicans meanwhile remain idle. If they allow Trump to pit the party against patriotism, watch out.

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 20 November 2020

Word Count: 847

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War: what is it good for? Apparently, in Washington’s world of think tanks, the answer is: the bottom line.

In fact, as the Biden presidency approaches, an era of great-power competition between the United States and China is already taken for granted inside the Washington Beltway. Much less well known are the financial incentives that lurk behind so many of the voices clamoring for an ever-more-militarized response to China in the Pacific. We’re talking about groups that carefully avoid the problems such an approach will provoke when it comes to the real security of the United States or the planet. A new cold war is likely to be dangerous and costly in an America gripped by a pandemic, its infrastructure weakened, and so many of its citizens in dire economic straits. Still, for foreign lobbyists, Pentagon contractors, and Washington’s many influential think tanks, a “rising China” means only one thing: rising profits.

Defense contractors and foreign governments are spending millions of dollars annually funding establishment think tanks (sometimes in secret) in ways that will help set the foreign-policy agenda in the Biden years. In doing so, they gain a distinctly unfair advantage when it comes to influencing that policy, especially which future tools of war this country should invest in and how it should use them.

Not surprisingly, many of the top think-tank recipients of foreign funding are also top recipients of funding from this country’s major weapons makers. The result: an ecosystem in which those giant outfits and some of the countries that will use their weaponry now play major roles in bankrolling the creation of the very rationales for those future sales. It’s a remarkably closed system that works like a dream if you happen to be a giant weapons firm or a major think tank. Right now, that system is helping accelerate the further militarization of the whole Indo-Pacific region.

In the Pacific, Japan finds itself facing an increasingly tough set of choices when it comes to its most significant military alliance (with the United States) and its most important economic partnership (with China). A growing U.S. presence in the region aimed at counterbalancing China will allow Japan to remain officially neutral, even as it reaps the benefits of both partnerships.

To walk that tightrope (along with the defense contractors that will benefit financially from the further militarization of the region), Japan spends heavily to influence thinking in Washington. Recent reports from the Center for International Policy’s Foreign Influence Initiative (FITI), where the authors of this piece work, reveal just how countries like Japan and giant arms firms like Lockheed Martin and Boeing functionally purchase an inside track on a think-tank market that’s hard at work creating future foreign-policy options for this country’s elite.

How to make a think tank think Take the prominent think tank the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), which houses programs focused on the “China threat” and East Asian “security.” Its Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative, which gets funding from the governments of Japan and the Philippines, welcomes contributions “from all governments in Asia, as well as corporate and foundation support.”

Unsurprisingly, the program also paints a picture of Japan as central “to preserving the liberal international order” in the face of the dangers of an “increasingly assertive China.” It also highlights that country’s role as Washington’s maritime security partner in the region. There’s no question that Japan is indeed an important ally of Washington. Still, positioning its government as a lynchpin in the international peace (or war) process seems a dubious proposition at best.

CSIS is anything but alone when it comes to the moneyed interests pushing Washington to invest ever more in what now passes for “security” in the Pacific region. A FITI report on Japanese operations in the U.S., for instance, reveals at least 3,209 lobbying activities in 2019 alone, as various lobbyists hired by that country and registered under the Foreign Agents Registration Act targeted both Congress and think tanks like CSIS on behalf of the Japanese government. Such firms, in fact, raked in more than $30 million from that government last year alone. From 2014 to 2019, Japan was also the largest East Asian donor to the top 50 most influential U.S. think tanks. The results of such investments have been obvious when it comes to both the products of those think tanks and congressional policies.

Think-tank recipients of Japanese funding are numerous and, because that country is such a staunch ally of Washington, its government can be more open about its activities than is typical. Projects like the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace’s “China Risk and China Opportunity for the U.S.-Japan Alliance,” funded by the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, are now the norm inside the Beltway. You won’t be surprised to learn that the think-tank scholars working on such projects almost inevitably end up highlighting Japan’s integral role in countering “the China threat” in the influential studies they produce. That threat itself, of course, is rarely questioned. Instead, its dangers and the need to confront them are invariably reinforced.

Another Carnegie Endowment study, “Bolstering the Alliance Amid China’s Military Resurgence,” is typical in that regard. It’s filled with warnings about China’s growing military power — never mind that, in 2019, the United States spent nearly triple what China did on its military, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. Like so many similarly funded projects inside the Beltway, this one recommended further growth in military cooperation between the U.S. and Japan. Important as well, it claimed, was developing “the capability to wage combined multidomain joint operations” which “would require accelerating operational response times to enhance firepower.”

The Carnegie project lists its funding and, as it turns out, that foundation has taken in at least $825,000 from Japan and approximately the same amount from defense contractors and U.S. government sources over the past six years. And Carnegie’s recommendations recently came to fruition when the Trump administration announced the second-largest sale of U.S. weaponry to Japan, worth more than $23 billion worth.

If the Japanese government has a stake in funding such think tanks to get what it wants, so does the defense industry. The top 50 think tanks have received more than $1 billion from the U.S. government and defense contractors over those same six years. Such contractors alone lobby Congress to the tune of more than $20 million each election cycle. Combine such sums with Japanese funding (not to speak of the money spent by other governments that desire policy influence in Washington) and you have a confluence of interests that propels U.S. military expenditures and the sale of weapons globally on a mind-boggling scale.

A defense build-up Is the order of the day An April 2020 report on the “Future of US-Japan Defense Collaboration” by the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security offers a typical example of how such pro-militarization interests are promoted. That report, produced in partnership with the Japanese embassy, begins with the premise that “the United States and Japan must accelerate and intensify their long-standing military and defense-focused coordination and collaboration.”

Specifically, it urges the United States to “take measures to incentivize Japan to work with Lockheed Martin on the F-2 replacement program,” known as the F-3. (The F-2 Support Fighter is the jet Lockheed developed and produced in partnership with Mitsubishi Heavy Industries for the Japanese Defense Forces.) While the report does acknowledge its partnership with the embassy of Japan, it fails to acknowledge that Lockheed donated three quarters of a million dollars to the influential Atlantic Council between 2014 and 2019 and that Japan generally prefers to produce its own military equipment domestically.

The Atlantic Council report continues to recommend the F-3 as the proper replacement for the F-2, “despite political challenges, technology-transfer concerns,” and “frustration from all parties” involved. This recommendation comes at a time when Japan has increasingly sought to develop its own defense industry. Generally speaking, no matter the Japanese embassy’s support for the Atlantic Council, that country’s military is eager to develop a new stealth fighter of its own without the help of either Lockheed Martin or Boeing. While both companies wish to stay involved in the behemoth project, the Atlantic Council specifically advocates only for Lockheed, which just happens to have contributed more than three times what Boeing did to that think tank’s coffers.

A 2019 report by the Hudson Institute on the Japan-U.S. alliance echoed similar sentiments, outlining a security context in which Japan and the United States should focus continually on deterring “aggression by China.” To do so, the report suggested, American-made ground-launched missiles (GCLMs) were one of several potential weapons Japan would need in order to prepare a robust “defense” strategy against China. Notably, the first American GCLM test since the United States withdrew from the Cold War era Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty in 2019 used a Lockheed Martin Mark 41 Launch System and Raytheon’s Tomahawk Land Attack Cruise Missile. The Hudson Institute had not only received at least $270,000 from Japan between 2014 and 2018, but also a minimum of $100,000 from Lockheed Martin.

In 2020, CSIS organized an unofficial working group for industry professionals and government officials that it called the CSIS Alliance Interoperability Series to discuss the development of the future F-3 fighter jet. While Japanese and American defense contractors fight for the revenue that will come from its production, the think tank claims that American, Japanese, and Australian industry representatives and officials will “consider the political-military and technical issues that the F-3 debate raises.” Such working groups are far from rare and offer think tanks incredible access to key decision-makers who often happen to be their benefactors as well.

All told, between 2014 and 2019, CSIS received at least $5 million from the U.S. government and Pentagon contractors, including at least $400,000 from Lockheed Martin and more than $200,000 from Boeing. In this fashion, a privileged think-tank elite has cajoled its way into the inner circles of policy formation (and it matters little whether we’re talking about the Trump administration or the future Biden one). Think about it for a moment: possibly the most crucial relationship on the planet between what looks like a rising and a falling great power (in a world that desperately needs their cooperation) is being significantly influenced by experts and officials invested in the industry guaranteed to militarize that very relationship and create a twenty-first-century version of the Cold War.

Any administration, in other words, lives in something like an echo chamber that continually affirms the need for a yet greater defense build-up led by those who would gain most from it.

Profiting from great power competition Japan is singled out in this analysis because the Center for International Policy’s Foreign Influence Transparency Initiative, where we work, had striking access to its influence data. There are, however, many other nations with defense agendas in the Indo-Pacific region who act similarly. As a Norwegian think-tank document put it, “Funding powerful think tanks is one way to gain such access, and some think tanks in Washington are openly conveying that they can service only those foreign governments that provide funding.” A Japanese official publicly noted that such funding of U.S. think tanks “is an investment.” You can’t put it much more bluntly or accurately than that.

Foreign governments and the defense industry debate the nitty-gritty of how best to arm a region whose continued militarization is accepted as a given. The need to stand up to the Chinese “aggressor” is a foregone conclusion of most thought leaders in Washington. They ought, of course, to be weighing and debating the entire security picture, including the potential future devastation of climate change, rather than simply piling yet more weaponry atop the outdated tools of war.

To be sure, think tanks don’t make U.S. foreign policy, nor do foreign lobbyists and defense contractors. But their money, distributed in copious amounts, does buy them crucial seats at that policymaking table, while dissenters are generally left out in the cold.

What’s the solution? For starters, a little transparency in Washington foreign-policy-making circles would be useful so that the public can be made more aware of the conflicts of interest that rule the roost when it comes to China policy. All think tanks should be required to publicly disclose their donors and funders. At least the Atlantic Council and CSIS report their funders by levels of donations and note certain sponsors of events or reports (a basic level of transparency that makes a piece like this possible). Such a standard of transparency should minimally be practiced by all think tanks, including prominent organizations like the American Enterprise Institute and the Earth Institute, neither of which releases any information about its funders, to highlight potential conflicts of interests.

Without transparency, the defense contractors and foreign governments that donate to think tanks help create foreign-policy thinking in which this world is, above all, in constant need of more weapons systems. This only increases military tensions globally, while helping to perpetuate the interests and profits of a defense industry that is, in truth, antithetical to the interests of most Americans, so many of whom would prefer diplomatic, peaceful, and coordinated solutions to the challenges of a rising China.

Unfortunately, as foreign policy is now made, a rising China is also guaranteed to lift all boats (submarines, aircraft carriers, and surface ships) as well as fighter planes aiding the military-industrial complex on a planet increasingly at war with itself.

Cassandra Stimpson is a research project director with the Foreign Influence Transparency Initiative (FITI) at the Center for International Policy (CIP). Holly Zhang is a researcher with FITI at CIP. This article first appeared at TomDispatch.com

Copyright ©2020 Cassandra Stimpson and Holly Zhang — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 19 November 2020

Word Count: 2,247

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The president lost the election. He’s losing his legal fight. He’s now trying to get obscure local election officials to overrule the sovereignty of the citizenry. It’s a last-ditch effort on Donald Trump’s part, but also a clear sign that democracy isn’t the point for the president or the GOP. It’s an obstacle to power they must overcome.

According to the Washington Post, the president on Tuesday called a Republican member of the Wayne County Board of Canvassers. Monica Palmer said he called after she and another Republican member changed their minds, deciding to certify votes in their jurisdiction. (They had initially refused to.) Importantly, the president’s phone call came before Palmer and William Hartmann changed their minds again. They filed affidavits Wednesday alleging they were “improperly pressured” to certify votes.

Bear in mind none of this matters. The president may have told Palmer and Hartmann to “rescind” their votes, but Michigan law prohibits it. The move is, moreover, part of an unprecedented effort by Trump to delay or undermine a peaceful transition of power, said University of Kentucky law professor Joshua Douglas. “It would be the end of democracy as we know it,” he told the AP. “This is just not a thing that can happen.”

What’s curious is that Michigan would go blue even if the president’s gambit succeeded. President-elect Joe Biden’s vote margin there is in the tens of thousands. What did Trump hope to accomplish by improperly pressuring obscure local election officials? If democracy isn’t the point, and winning Michigan isn’t the point, what is? I think the point can be seen in Palmer and Hartmann’s term “improperly pressured.”

True improper pressure is the president of the United States calling an obscure local election official to say she and the other guy made the wrong choice, now go out there and humiliate yourselves in my name even if there’s no chance of winning Michigan. False improper pressure is local citizens like Ned Staebler who, during a public hearing of the Wayne County Board of Canvassers, said Palmer and Hartmann were choosing to disenfranchise Black Detroiters, a cardinal sin for which they will burn in Hell.

Palmer told the Post:

Last night was heartbreaking. I sat in that chair for two hours listening to people attack me” as a racist who was attempting to disenfranchise Detroit residents. She said her intentions were the opposite—but her efforts have been lost in a sea of invective that night that included death threats against her and her family.

Free speech isn’t a threat unless it’s literal. Otherwise, it’s protected. People seeking to invalidate democracy often make free speech seem threatening, though. “I sat in that chair for two hours listening to people attack me.” That’s what Palmer and Hartmann mean by “improperly pressured.” Outrage poured down on them for refusing to certify the vote. The public pressured them. Democracy urged them. Nothing’s improper there.

Then they changed their minds a second time. That’s where true improper pressure comes in. Not only did the president appear to tell them to “rescind” their decisions; Palmer received death threats after voting to allow Wayne County to turn blue. Kayla Ruble says she saw the texts threatening Palmer.

Palmer told Ruble they came from the right and the left, but that’s not credible. (She said “leftist” threats came from “Antifa from Grosse Pointe”). More likely, she got death threats from Trump supporters aiming to punish her for disloyalty to Trump despite loyalty making no difference.

Like Palmer, Tricia Raffensperger, wife of the Georgia secretary of state, is also getting death threats. Fox’s Atlanta affiliate reported some of them: “You better not botch this recount. Your life depends on it.” “Your husband deserves to face a firing squad.” “The Raffenspergers should be put on trial for treason and face execution.”

Back in Michigan, white vigilantes arrested in connection with a scheme to kidnap the governor had a Plan B, according to prosecutors. ABC’s Chicago affiliate reported Wednesday it “involved a takeover of the Michigan capitol building by 200 combatants who would stage a week-long series of televised executions of public officials.”

If democracy isn’t the point, and winning Michigan isn’t the point, what is? The point, I think, is simple once you think about it. It’s subordination to the collective. Palmer succumbed to democratic pressure. She betrayed the group. She must be punished. Humiliation or death, the goal is the same.

The call of the tribe is so strong you’re willing to slander democracy — “I sat in that chair for two hours listening to people attack me.” Individuals don’t matter. Neither does democracy. Not till they threaten the collective. Then they justify an equal, opposite, and seditious reaction.

Put like this, it’s clear Trump isn’t just a loser. He’s the leader of an insurgency in the making.

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 19 November 2020

Word Count: 803

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Most of the Middle East’s serious problems — wars, terrorism, foreign militarism, politicized sectarianism, refugee flows, mass poverty and vulnerability — reflect the consequences of the two great overarching trends in the past century of the modern Arab state system.

In the first half of the century, broadly from 1920 to 1970, the Arab region completed impressive state-building processes that steadily improved citizens’ quality of life.

In the century’s second half, from 1970 to 2020, about half the Arab states have seen their state-building momentum stall or even reverse. Economic and social development slowed after 1990 when most non-oil-financed governments could no longer improve or even maintain the quality of life of large swaths of their populations. The UN today says that at least 70% of all Arabs are poor or vulnerable, and that figure is rising daily due to the economic impact of the oil price drop and the Covid-19 pandemic.

Two important dynamics emerged that led to the rise of non-state actors (NSAs): 1) some states started to fragment as local authorities affirmed their authority over a weakened central government (Sudan, Iraq, Lebanon, Yemen); 2) in every non-oil-rich country, non-state actors assumed a bigger direct role in providing citizens services they had obtained from the state during the previous three generations (security, identity, political voice, material assistance, and basic services). 

Some NSAs became so powerful that they paralleled the central government in some places (Muslim Brotherhood, Hezbollah, Kurdish groups) or even replaced it in others (Hamas, Islamic State, Kurdistan, Insarullah-Houthis, South Sudan rebels). Powerful armed NSAs, like Hezbollah, Hamas, and Insarullah-Houthis, took over the national security role of the state and also provided basic services.

Other armed groups like Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF) militias in Iraq, complemented the state’s security operations against threats like Islamic State, and PMFs in Syria, Yemen, or Libya have been created, funded, trained, and armed by foreign powers (regional ones like Iran, Turkey, the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Israel, or foreign powers like the USA).

Hundreds of NSAs across the region are unarmed civilian groups that are anchored in the two most powerful forces that existed before the modern state arrived: religious and tribal identities. The modern state usually could not control or co-opt these powerful forces, and mostly coexists with them. When central governments in the 1990s started contracting and ignoring large population segments, the tribal and religious NSAs stepped in smoothly. Some of them in Syria, Iraq, Libya, and Yemen also became politicized and frequently sought a share of government power.

The first big sign of Arab citizens’ discontent that translated into stronger NSAs was the rapid expansion of the Muslim Brotherhood and other such Islamists in the mid-1970s. This was due to multiple factors, including: the humiliation of the June 1967 Arab defeat by Israel; the failure of socialism, Arab nationalism, Ba’athism, and capitalism to meet citizen needs equitably; government corruption due to incompetent rule by family- and military-based regimes; and, the stresses of inflation and high living costs that sent several hundred million Arabs into poverty.

As citizens steadily lost trust in the central state’s credibility, and its legitimacy in some cases, after the 1980s, they increasingly turned to NSAs for their essential personal, communal, and political needs. NSAs like the Muslim Brotherhood grew stronger and often shared power, due to several reasons: they focus squarely on citizens’ basic needs, they are anchored in the communities they serve and speak in social justice terms that resonate with citizens, they are mostly uncorrupted by massive money flows, and they emphasize equitable socio-economic development at home and confronting aggression from abroad.

Rami G. Khouri has reported in the Middle East for 50 years. He is journalist-in-residence and a senior public policy fellow at the American University of Beirut, and a non-resident senior fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School.

Copyright ©2020 Rami G. Khouri — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 19 November 2020

Word Count: 598

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My bullhorn is rather small, but I’ll do what I can to amplify Ned Staebler. He’s one of four members of the Wayne County Board of Canvassers. Two Republican members, William Hartmann and Monica Palmer, voted Tuesday against certifying the votes of Wayne County, citing irregularities in Detroit. The board was deadlocked, 2-2.

It was a stunt, purely performative. A state agency was prepared to step in. If that didn’t work, a state judge would have decided. Given the facts of the case, Michigan was going blue no matter what. (Joe Biden’s margin of victory over Donald Trump was in the tens of thousands.) But trying to undermine the sovereignty of the people is nearly as bad as successfully undermining it.

I’ll explain why Ned Staebler’s statement last night is important to America politics, but first you have to read what he said:

I’m not going to try and change your minds. I just want to let you know that the Trump stink, the stain of racism that you, William Hartmann and Monica Palmer, have covered yourself in is going to follow you throughout history. Your grandchildren are going to think of you like Bull Connor or George Wallace.

Monica Palmer and William Hartmann will forever be known … as two racists who did something so unprecedented that they disenfranchised hundreds of thousands of Black voters in the city of Detroit, because they were ordered to. Probably, I know, Monica, you think Q told you to do it or some other crazy stuff like that.

But just know when you try to sleep tonight that millions of people around the world now on Twitter know the name Monica Palmer and William Hartmann as two people who are completely racist and without an understanding of what integrity means or a shred of human decency. The law isn’t on your side. History won’t be on your side. Your conscience will not be on your side and, Lord knows, when you go to meet your Maker, your soul is going to be very, very warm.

Palmer and Hartmann changed their minds within hours after a world of hurt came down. I don’t know if Staebler did that. (I’d like to think so.) In any case, it’s important to bear in mind that Staebler’s jeremiad came after having outlined the many ways Hartmann and Palmer were wrong.

He marshaled an impressive array of concrete facts, applied sound reasoning to it, and came to the moral conclusion that Hartman and Palmer are not only wrong; they were choosing to be wrong, because being wrong benefited their presidential candidate even though it was injurious to the republic.

Only after making his case did Staebler launch into hortatory. Only after seeing they were immutable did Staebler give up engaging them. “I’m not going to try and change your minds.” Indeed, there was no point. It was time to lay down the tools of rational evidence-based persuasion and take up arms of political rhetoric. It was time to stop discussing the results of their behavior and start discussing their intentions: the political sabotage of “hundreds of thousands of Black voters in the city of Detroit.”

I’m making a big deal of where reasoned argument ends and political rhetoric begins, because the Democrats, including Joe Biden, seem unwilling to step over the gap.

Lindsey Graham interfered with Georgia’s recount. (He asked its secretary of state if he could toss out legal ballots, a possible federal crime.) GOP electors in Nevada are suing to have Trump declared the winner there or have the state’s votes “annulled.” Along with shenanigans in Wayne County, Michigan, this is a picture of systemic rot.

Trump isn’t the problem. Elected Republicans aren’t the problem. The entire GOP is acting like a separatist movement more than a legitimate political party. Yet all Chuck Schumer can say is there’s “no excuse” for discrediting “our democratic elections.”

It’s time to emulate Ned Staebler. Stop trying to change Republican minds. Stop saying they are harming democracy. (We know this.) Start doubting their intentions. Are they loyal to the United States or not?

Tribalists tend to respond to tribalist claims. The biggest tribe is the American republic. We must demand the GOP pick a side. As Dave Painchaud put it:

It’s important to recognize that confrontation is not generally the way to go. There’s really only one exception: fascism. You can’t negotiate with that. Fascism requires a ruthless response. It’s an awful thing, but it’s undeniably true.

 

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 18 November 2020

Word Count: 747

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