Philippa Kaur

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    Forecasting the US-China Relationship

    With a new US administration about to be inaugurated, it is prudent to look at the dynamics and variables shaping the future of one of the world’s most important relationships, that between Washington and Beijing. President Donald Trump came into office looking to take a more aggressive approach toward China. Trump’s reliance on figures like Peter Navarro and Mike Pompeo put American foreign policy on a forceful path. While Navarro, as Trump’s trade adviser, was focused on conducting trade wars, Secretary of State Pompeo was centered on military balancing. In the final year of the Trump presidency, relations with China were rapidly disintegrating, with little room left for cooperation.

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    If President Trump presided over a rapid deterioration of the US-China relationship, under President Joe Biden, the relationship is likely experience a stable deterioration. A stable deterioration is typified by two features: the continuance of deviating trajectories and the transactional nature of future cooperation. These two features interact to create a new status quo in the US-China relationship.

    Deviating Trajectories

    The era of engagement between Beijing and Washington was sustained through a shared interest in China’s economic and political integration in the international community. Today, China under President Xi Jinping has sought to both blunt international political institutions and create international financial bodies, thereby challenging US spuremacy and allowing for more Chinese dexterity. Xi’s international revisionism struggles against American national interests, creating a split between the two global giants.

    As President-elect Joe Biden is in the final stages of forming his national security team, he sends a strong, clear signal: This will not be a third Barack Obama term. Biden has declared that he plans on nominating Antony Blinken as secretary of state and Jake Sullivan as national security adviser. While both are veterans of the Obama administration, their tone and language signal a break from the Obama years. Both Blinken and Sullivan have acknowledged the need to develop a new strategy for China that goes beyond traditional engagement into managing competition.

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    At a Hudson Institute event last summer, Blinken stated, “We are in a competition with China — and there’s nothing wrong with competition, if it’s fair.” Continuing the theme of managing competition with China, a piece for Foreign Affairs co-authored by Sullivan with Kurt Campbell, the CEO of the Asia Group, suggests that “the signs that China is gearing up to contest America’s global leadership are unmistakable, and they are ubiquitous.”

    These statements follow a larger trend within the Democratic Party of getting tougher on China. For example, in the 2016 Democratic Party Platform, China is only mentioned seven times. In the 2020 document, mentions were up to 22 and included language like “push back against” and “stand up to.” A Biden administration is going to bring strategic clarity to US-China competition. Key advisers like Sullivan and Blinken are not pollyannish about the relationship and recognize the dramatic change that has been occurring for nearly a decade. As Biden leaves America’s engagement strategy behind, he will advance a more confident and more energetic foreign policy in defense of US interests and values.

    Meanwhile, on the Chinese side of the relationship, President Xi Jinping has pursued an aggressive posture that has shaken the regional order. His ambitious “national rejuvenation” strategy has created consternation. Xi has abandoned institutional integration and instead established his own multilateral financial institutions to blunt the influence of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. The People’s Liberation Army has also been more assertive in promoting Beijing’s territorial claims in the South China Sea. The complete political absorption of Hong Kong has alarmed neighboring Taiwan. Lastly, Xi’s extraordinary Belt and Road Initiative has expanded China’s political influence across the region.

    President Xi’s national rejuvenation campaign is in direct conflict with the interests of the United States and its allies. The US stands atop of an international order that promotes political and economic liberty. Through this alliance system, the United States promotes and secures a free and open Indo-Pacific. Under Xi’s helmsmanship, China wants to displace, if not replace, the US and develop a new, Sinocentric order. These trajectories will only continue to deviate until a new status quo can develop.

    Areas of Cooperation

    While the chasm in the US-China relationship widens and deepens, there are several areas where American and Chinese interests align. The United States and China must develop procedures for collaboration in these areas. If the relationship is only limited to competition, problems will arise that could otherwise be solved. Additionally, neither country gains from complete destruction of bilateral relations.

    The stabilization of the Korean Peninsula will require significant coordination between Washington and Beijing. Neither the Chinese nor the Americans want to see conventional or nuclear conflict on the peninsula. The two countries do not need to feign friendship to achieve stabilization, but it does require communication.

    Climate change is an issue that is not only an opportunity for cooperation but a problem that demands collaboration. As the world’s two largest economies, the US and China have a lot of influence in affecting the trajectory of global warming and climate change. Both countries stand only to gain from working together on this issue. Collaboration on the environment does not require a new proclamation of camaraderie between the two nations. Each government can recognize that cooperation on climate change is important without declaring a new era of relations. The business-like, transactional nature of US-China cooperation creates an environment where the two countries can work together without upsetting the aggressive factions within their respective countries.

    When accounting for these dynamics, the most likely scenario to play out under the Biden administration is stable deterioration. Stable deterioration recognizes the continued decline in bilateral relations brought about by the deviating trajectories of the two countries but understands that there is a limit to that decline. Both countries accept collaboration when interests align, but the nature of cooperation is transactional. Through managing competition and transactional cooperation, a new status quo in the US-China relationship will develop.

    This scenario assumes that neither President Biden nor President Xi perceives any value in the destruction of bilateral relations, but both recognize that competition is unavoidable. Both countries will continue to pursue their interests in the region, and neither will apologize for it. But both the United States and China will work together to develop a new relationship that allows them to compete without the total abandonment of the relationship.   

    The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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    Corporations Step Up to Punish Republicans

    Perhaps the most surprising outcome of the Capitol riots has been the reaction of corporate donors to the funding of political campaigns. These locomotives of democracy are suddenly unhappy. The shame that now stains the doubly impeached Donald Trump has shaken and apparently cracked what had become the main pillar of electoral politics in the US: corporate money.

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    One commentator states it in these terms: “Big corporations are deciding they don’t want their campaign contributions being linked to violent insurrections.” This has turned out to be particularly problematic for Republican lawmakers after the scandalous raid on Capitol Hill on January 6. The Washington Post reports that “Several major companies on Monday said they planned to cut off political donations to the 147 members of Congress who last week voted against certifying the results of the presidential election.” Yahoo Finance notes what may become a long-term trend as “companies are just beginning to recognize that ‘political spending today poses a really broad risk and a deep risk that they need to manage.’”

    Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:

    Broad risk:

    Risk related to the level of awareness of an entire population, as opposed to deep risk that concerns the legal and commercial status of a monopoly or privileged economic position.

    Contextual Note

    The Blue Cross Blue Shield Association, a provider of health insurance to over 100 million people, has now pledged to stop its contributions “to those lawmakers who voted to undermine our democracy.” Critics might point out that health insurance providers have been undermining democracy for decades. They literally control Congress thanks not only to their lobbying efforts but also to the direct campaign contributions needed to obtain the legislation their lobbyists push through Congress.

    Will pulling back weaken their chances of getting privileged treatment in the future? The risk is real. But health insurance providers are experts in evaluating risk. They realize that the public’s growing preference for a national single-payer system means they desperately need to improve their moral profile. What better way than to express their indignation at the immorality of politicians?

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    Yahoo Finance interviewed Bruce Freed, the president of the Center for Political Accountability. Freed asks the fundamental question about what Donald Trump, in his original presidential campaign, referred to as the DC “swamp” that needed draining. “Does this really lead to a fundamental change in the way companies approach their political spending?” Freed calls the recent announcements a “reaction of the moment.” He nevertheless thinks this could be the beginning of a trend. It all depends on how long the public’s indignation lasts as well as how consistently the media give it play.

    Wall Street banks have taken the most radical position. Rather than punishing Republicans for their lack of civism, some “have announced steps to back away from giving money to all lawmakers — both Democrats and Republicans — at least for now.” This is undoubtedly an act of pure PR calculation. They must at all costs avoid singling out Republicans for punishment, who have always been the first to do their bidding. Yahoo judges that this “appears to be temporary and could expire before fundraising for the 2022 midterm elections begins in earnest.” In other words, this clearly is PR. It sounds more like a vacation than a strike. Basically, these companies will save some money in the short term, take the time to observe the drift of opinion and think out their strategy just in time for the next midterms.

    This entire episode demonstrates how radical Trump’s impact on US institutions has been. The Republican Party has become the principal victim. When Republican elected officials in their majority made the choice of remaining loyal to Trump, they painted themselves into a corner. They accepted Trump’s strategy of polarizing the electorate beyond possible reconciliation. For the past four years, public debate has consistently turned around the extreme positions Trump tweeted on a daily basis. The media lost all interest in rational debate about real political issues. It doesn’t attract eyeballs.

    It wasn’t always like this. In the lead-up to the 2016 Republican National Convention, the GOP establishment massively opposed Trump. At the time, commentators speculated about a possible revolt within the party against Trump’s nomination. Party stalwarts even seemed to count on his defeat in the November election to rid the party of its troublemaker. In vain.

    When, to Trump’s own surprise, he won against Hillary Clinton, the designated dynastic heiress to the imperial throne as defined by the Democrats, establishment Republicans employed a strategy that consisted of accommodating Trump’s idiosyncrasies while pursuing their traditional goals: tax cuts, militarism and transforming the judiciary. The strategy worked well, indeed too well for the taste of many Republicans. They realized that Trump had become the key to the party’s winning of elections, and they knew for a fact that politics today is about nothing other than winning elections.

    Historical Note

    This story highlights not just the importance of corporate financing in political campaigns but also the emergence of a culture focused exclusively on electoral success. If the US is still a democracy, it has become literally a democracy of beggars. The needs of the citizens and the methods of good government have taken a back seat to the perennial quest for campaign funding. Members of Congress now spend 67% of their time on fundraising. Not only does that mean that they have limited time to do their job as legislators — it also means that their fundraising needs redefine and inevitably pervert their official role in government: representing their constituents.

    At best, in their interactions with lobbyists, lawmakers can resist specific demands of their donors on the grounds that what they are requesting would be unacceptable to their voters. What happens then is that, instead of refusing, they will more likely work on the window-dressing that makes policies inimical to their constituents’ interests seem logical, acceptable or simply inevitable. 

    This type of beggars’ democracy becomes palatable to many because society itself has become a civilization of beggars fighting for survival in an economy of beggars. Lobbyists themselves are professional beggars, but with clout. The rest of the population has increasingly adapted to the gig economy, which sums up what democratic politics has become. 

    Embed from Getty Images

    Traditional economies owed their stability to a somewhat sclerotic continuity of gainful economic activity. Successive generations in the same family exercised identical vocations. With the advent of the industrial revolution, capitalism worked on the basis of creating a pool of largely uprooted workers begging for a job that had nothing to do with inherited skills. This brought the advantage of flexibility and the capacity of manufacturing to produce more efficiently what generations of artisans could only create on a limited scale. The enclosure system in England forced peasants to towns where manufacturing, exploiting the resources made available through colonial conquest, offered the possibility of employment. The poor of the countryside became the beggars of the town.

    The Industrial Revolution created a society that depended on the notion of mass anonymity. It required pools of potential workers who could be available for employment to meet the growing needs of industry. The anonymous masses then had the choice of selecting to invest personally in skill sets that promised possible employment. This relationship has defined the economic system that has prevailed for the past two centuries in the West and now in most of the global economy.

    Because anonymity and fluctuations in every marketplace lead to instability, the latest permutation of this model has been the evolution toward the gig economy. Paradoxically, it represents a return to the logic of early capitalism and the policy of subsistence wages. Employers needed simply to ensure that the pool of workers could be physically maintained to continue to meet the needs of production. The policy of subsistence gradually evolved to include cultural factors that contributed to a notion of prosperous and stable subsistence. This permitted the creation of the modern welfare state. But the aggravation of competition and the financialization of the economy ultimately led to the gig society where people sell their time on a piecemeal basis.

    Millions of people make their living online. Increasingly, they do it as beggars, offering their services in the hope someone will need them enough to pay. A beggar’s democracy requires a beggar’s economy.

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

    The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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    America: Motherhood, Apple Pie and the Mob

    The United States began as a glint in the eyes of an English mob of oddballs, dissenters and criminals let loose on what they considered virgin territory. Once secure in their new digs, they administered rough justice to the original Americans and any colonist who fell afoul of community rules. Eventually, casting aside their imperial British overlords, the rabble achieved a measure of respectability by creating an independent state.

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    Even as the United States fashioned an army, a constabulary and an evolving rule of law, the mob continued to define what it meant to be an American. It policed the slave economy. It helped push the borders westward. It formed the shock troops that rolled back Reconstruction. A 20th-century version of this mob rampaged during the long Red Summer of violence that stretched from 1917 to 1923. It mobilized against the civil rights movement. And during the Trump era, it has reared its ugly head in Charlottesville, Portland and, last week, on Capitol Hill. America is motherhood, apple pie … and the mob.

    Un-American

    Last week, many a politician decried the mob violence at the US Capitol as “un-American.” Consider, for instance, the words of Kevin McCarthy, House Minority Leader: “This is so un-American. I condemn any of this violence. I could not be sadder or more disappointed with the way our country looks right now. People are getting hurt. Anyone involved in this, if you’re hearing me, hear me loud and clear: This is not the American way.”

    McCarthy was not on the same podium with Donald Trump earlier in the day urging on the mob. But he and the president were on the same page between November 3 and January 6. Two days after the election, the California Republican announced that Trump had won. Later, he supported the outlandish Texas lawsuit to overturn the election results, refused to acknowledge Biden’s win well into 2021, and stood up in the House last week even after the mob retreated to challenge the Electoral College results.

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    After January 6, McCarthy has tried to put some distance between himself and the rabble. He has been willing to consider an official censure of the president and has also indicated that he won’t try to enforce party unity against an impeachment vote. No doubt McCarthy has shifted his stance because he feared for his own life when the insurrectionists stormed the barricades and invaded his sanctum. Trump, enjoying the images on TV, refused McCarthy’s plea to issue a statement calling off his attack dogs. It’s enough to make even the most loyal lapdog bark a different tune.

    None of this detracts from the fact that McCarthy, since the election, was the elected representative not of his California district but of the mob. He was their cheerleader, their mouthpiece on the Hill, one of the many suits over the ages who have translated the “will of the people” into official-sounding acts and bills that attempt to preserve the privileges of white people at the expense of everyone else. For that is the beating heart of Trumpism: the Confederate flag, the noose, the closed polling booth, the knee on the neck of non-white America.

    The word “mob” makes it sounds as though the violence was perpetrated by a group of mindless rowdies. But there has always been a method to the madness of this particular crowd. Let’s take a closer look at what the latest incarnation of the American mob wants, how it connects to like-minded groups overseas, and what to expect over the next weeks, months and years.

    Against the Globalists

    At first glance, the people who descended upon Washington to disrupt Congress on January 6 are almost obsessively focused on domestic issues. They’re not so much America First as Trump First. They have turned against anyone in the Republican Party who has abandoned the soon-to-be-ex-president, and that includes the vice president. They are nationalist and parochial. They are also anti-globalist, but that doesn’t mean that they aren’t global in their strategizing, their connections and their aspirations.

    One of the core components of the Stop the Steal coalition is QAnon, an amorphous global network that believes that another amorphous global network — of Satanic child molesters — somehow controls the levers of international power. What started out as a conspiracy theory centered on Donald Trump as a St. George figure battling a devilish dragon went global in 2020, attracting adherents in 71 countries by August. One German QAnon group counts 120,000 members in its Telegram account.

    Another key member of the coalition is a bloc of white nationalists and militia members that encompasses accelerationists like the Boogaloo Bois, who want to spur a race war to bring down the liberal status quo, and organizations like the Proud Boys that emphasize male supremacy. These groups have forged global links over the last decade in Canada, Europe, Russia, Australia, New Zealand and elsewhere.

    Prior to the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, these chauvinists united around a “great replacement” narrative according to which immigrants and people of color are determined to “replace” white people through migration, higher birthrates or sheer pushiness. When the border closures around the pandemic reduced the salience of the immigration issue, the great replacement became a less useful organizing tool.

    Embed from Getty Images

    It was into this vacuum that QAnon became the conspiracy theory de jour. Meanwhile, the far right shifted its discourse on “globalists” to challenge their approach to COVID-19, their deference to the Chinese and their proposed “reset” of the global economy — anything to deflect attention from the obvious failures of the nationalist populists who headed up the countries with the highest number of infections and deaths: the United States, Brazil, India, Russia and the United Kingdom.

    Although they often disagree about particulars, this array of groups is united by an animus against government. They supported Trump not as the head of government but as someone opposed to government. And they adored him because he didn’t just hate the US government and the elites that staff it, but global governance as well. The “deep state” was always a canard. The far right despised the liberal state, full stop. Trump attracted an even wider following by squaring off against the expert class: the uppity journalists and fact-bound scientists and Hollywood liberals and hand-wringing academics. Burn it all down, Trump’s followers demanded.

    Inside-Outside Game

    Trump in government, however, represented a certain check on the most ambitious impulses of the far right. True, during his reign, extremists have come out into the streets to protest economic shutdowns, masking ordinances and Black Lives Matter mobilizations. Some extremists planned more violent interventions, like kidnapping the governor of Michigan. But with the administration on its side, with the Senate in Republican hands and with Republicans controlling the vast majority of state legislatures, the far right focused its wrath selectively. It played the ultimate inside-outside game.

    After the November election, with Trump on his way out of power, the far right no longer has to place any caveats on its anti-government impulses. First came an attack on Congress, not coincidentally on the very day that the Republicans lost their Senate majority. Next, the far right is planning an armed march on Washington and all 50 state capitols on January 17. To cap it off, a Million Militia March is planned for Inauguration Day.

    What happened on January 6 was, despite some prior planning, a disorganized coup attempt. What comes next may well be more precisely planned, which may result in a focus on the weakest links rather than the most potent symbols, just as the Oregon extremists chose the easily occupied Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in January 2016 rather than the heavily guarded state capitol building.

    The storming of the US Capitol, meanwhile, has proven to be a great winnower. The fainthearted, like Kevin McCarthy, have proven to be chaff, as has a number of previously ardent Trump supporters. According to polling conducted after the attack, “a quarter of Trump voters agree that actions should be taken to immediately remove him from office. Further, 41% of Trump voters believe he has ‘betrayed the values and interests of the Republican Party.’” This is an extraordinarily rapid fissure in what had hitherto been an impregnable base of support for Trump.

    What remains is a revolutionary core. They won’t muster enough force to make a difference over the next two weeks, not against the 15,000 National Guards likely to be deployed to Washington, DC, for Joe Biden’s inauguration. After the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in August 2017, the far right couldn’t handle the avalanche of criticism and could barely muster a couple of dozen extremists for a rally one year later in DC. But it has since altered its messaging and its strategy. Expect even more adaptation over the next months and years.

    What Comes Next

    The idea that the Civil War was a “war of Northern aggression” has survived 150 years of civic, political and media education to the contrary. A large section of white Southerners, and even a few folks outside the region, cling to their “lost cause” much as Serbian nationalists mourn their defeat on the plain of Kosovo in 1389, Hungarians rail against the loss of territory after the Trianon Treaty of 1920, and the Japanese and German far right has bridled at the “outside interference” that robbed their nations of a measure of sovereignty after World War II.

    Prepare for the “stolen election” narrative to serve a similar function for the Forever Trumpers. This narrative of an unfair political system ties together many of the far right’s themes: liberal institutions are fundamentally broken and corrupted, the mainstream media is compliant in tilting the playing field, and the globalists will do anything to regain power from “the people.” Note, too, how these messages can appeal to a left also angry at the status quo, and you can understand why so many people who voted for Bernie Sanders switched to Trump and why the European far right have harvested votes from previous bastions of the communist parties.

    Embed from Getty Images

    Such appeals to fairness — a stolen election is above all unfair — conceal the racist, sexist and otherwise exclusionary content of the far right’s agenda. An explicitly fascist platform has considerably less broad-based appeal than a cry to right a wrong. Over the next four years, the far right will beat this drum of political illegitimacy. It will claim that nothing the Biden administration does will be legal or constitutional because of its original sin of ascension via a stolen election.

    The fallout from January 6 will continue to divide the Republican Party. But the opportunity to brand the Democrats as illegitimate will prove just too addictive to be ignored. Consider the attacks on Obamacare or the successful effort to block Merrick Garland’s nomination to the Supreme Court. Even in the face of overwhelming counterevidence, the Republicans hammered on the illegitimacy of the Democratic initiatives. A “stolen election” caucus, composed of the congressional members who survive a corporate and fundraiser boycott, will attempt to pull the Republican Party further to the right, just as the Tea Party did during the Obama era.

    The international ramifications of this strategy are equally worrisome. The far right attacks governments not only because they are liberal in the sense of providing government “handouts,” but because they follow liberal principles of governance — checks and balances, free press, rights to gather and express dissent. Trump’s attacks on January 6 were not just seditious. They were designed to transform his position and that of the GOP into something resembling the United Russia party and Vladimir Putin’s leadership for life. Trump has always wanted to build a Moscow or a Budapest or an Ankara or a Managua on the Potomac: iron-fisted leadership, no serious political opposition, a cowering press, a cult of personality. He thought he saw his opportunity on January 6.

    This is also the ultimate goal of the mob. It doesn’t want anarchy, except as an interim strategy. It wants a strong hand on the tiller, as if Trump were the Great Helmsman guiding the country in a Great Leap Forward (or backward, given that a mob’s sense of direction is never very precise). Trump’s hands, however, are being wrenched from the tiller. Even better, he is being abandoned by leading members of his party, his social media enablers, his financial backers and his corporate sponsors. His ambition having overleapt itself, Trump has stumbled, irrevocably. The mob is taking note, even as it falls back to protect its wounded leader.

    For the next four years, prepare for the mob and its political representatives to rely on street power to identify, campaign for and put into office their next Great White Hope. What’s more quintessentially American than that?

    *[This article was originally published by Foreign Policy in Focus.]

    The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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    Who Owns Susan Collins’ Brain?

    As a senator from the state of Maine with a college education (though not Ivy League), Susan Collins must be considered an intelligent woman. She’s also a Republican. When an intelligent and responsible public figure writes an op-ed recounting an important event, we might suppose she would seek to show off her intelligence rather than the opposite. Not Susan Collins, who included this statement in her op-ed for the Bangor Daily News: “My first thought was that the Iranians had followed through on their threat to strike the Capitol.”

    Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:

    First thought:

    Often the most pertinent idea resulting from strong intuition, but sometimes exactly the kind of misguided musing no serious person would ever want to admit having allowed to cross their mind unless their aim was to cast doubt on the idea that they even possess a mind.

    Contextual Note

    Susan Collins may be spending too much time listening to recent speeches by Mike Pompeo or remembering past pronouncements of John Bolton. In her op-ed, she claims that she was “well aware that emotions were running high because of the president’s repeated claims that the election was ‘stolen,’ despite the fact that approximately 90 judges, including the Supreme Court justices, had ruled otherwise.” That would be enough of a clue for most intelligent people when the rumbling of mutiny began to become audible inside the Capitol on January 6.

    Even with that knowledge, the only credible explanation that popped into Collins’s brain was that it was an attack by Iran. Had she been a Democrat, she probably would have assumed that it was Vladimir Putin in person trying to break down the doors, armed, of course with a hammer, and sickle. But Collins is a Republican. Each party sees its own preferred goblins under the stairs.

    Cody Fenwick, writing for Alternet, judges that Collins “underestimated the true threat of Trump’s radicalism and right-wing extremism, and she is likely overestimating the threat posed from countries like Iran.” But it wasn’t about rational risk assessment. Collins’ comment tells us something deeper about how politicians think. First thoughts belong to the same family of mental events as Freudian slips.

    Embed from Getty Images

    They reveal processes that are anchored in a region of impulses and automatic reflexes that sits below the faculty of reasoning and decision-making. Politicians possess a Freudian unconscious meticulously programmed by their party’s ideology and propaganda. It can even prevent them from seeing or seeking to understand what is happening around them.

    Collins knew on that day that thousands of members of her own party were mobilizing to protest Trump’s electoral defeat. Unless she exists in a different universe, she knew something about who they were and how MAGA crowds and the adepts of QAnon typically behave. In her eyes, they were known to be rowdy, but they weren’t evil. As Trump himself had said concerning the events in Charlottesville: “There were good people on both sides.” 

    Despite that knowledge, her programmed logic assumed that an assault on the US government could only be attributable to a force officially classified as “evil.” It’s a time-honored Republican tradition. Reagan programmed the nation to fear the “empire of evil.” George W. Bush called it an “axis of evil.” And Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who now baselessly claims that “al-Qaeda has a new home base in Iran,” has been pushing the idea that Iran is the center of the axis. He added a more sinister commentary: “I would say Iran is indeed the new Afghanistan.” Afghanistan is a code word for “justified war.” 

    Since the Cold War, US foreign policy requires the inculcation of a Manichaean mythology that fixes in people’s brains the idea of a metaphysical combat between pure existential good (the US and at least one of its allies, Israel) and pure existential evil. Iran has been at the top of the rankings for the Trump administration, if only because of Obama’s shameful “Iran deal.” Al-Qaeda, of course, has remained the symbol of absolute evil since 9/11. This is true even when the US provides al-Qaeda’s affiliates with weapons in Syria, because Bashar-al-Assad, as the head of state, is even more evil.

    Balance is always important. Giving all the publicity to evil would be wrong. In her breathtaking account of the Senators’ daring escape from imagined Iranians, Collins also finds a way of highlighting the existence of pure existential good. She recounts the charming story of how Senator Todd Young, a Marines veteran, “moved over near Sen. Lisa Murkowski and me. Only later did I learn that he was positioning himself to repel the rioters and defend us.”

    As Joe Biden would say, God bless the troops. America’s military heroes, even after choosing a political career, are always ready to act when an evil enemy is at the door. This may help to explain why an overwhelming majority in Congress voted to override Donald Trump’s veto and approve the $740-billion Defense Authorization Act in December. After all, without that bloated expenditure, it is likely that there would be fewer well-trained warriors in the Senate to protect defenseless damsels in distress.

    In the end, the Iranians hadn’t mounted the nuclear attack all Americans (and Israelis) fear, or even a non-nuclear attack. The MAGA fanatics never managed to reach a single lawmaker. All was well that ended well, or at least not too badly, with only a handful of fatalities of unimportant people. It gave Collins the opportunity to vaunt her own bravery. She and her colleagues courageously stayed on to finish the job and defend the Constitution. As she proudly announces, “There was no way I was going to let these thugs succeed in their attempt to disrupt the constitutional process and undermine our democracy.”

    Historical Note

    Collins never tells us whether the heroic Senator Young also believed it was the Iranians pounding on the doors of the Capitol. Her harrowing tale is nevertheless worth reading. It evokes the atmosphere of the Viking siege of Paris in 885, when the monks at the Abbey of St. Germain des Pres woke up to discover a host of marauding Norsemen. Collins’ account may not be the equal of the lengthy poem by the Benedictine monk, Abbo Cernuus, “Bella Parisiacae Urbis,” but it does give an idea of the frightening unexpectedness of the threat.

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    Senator Young never had to step up to play the role of Count Odo or Bishop Gauzlin, two heroes who had some initial success displaying their prowess to fend off the invaders. The Viking siege lasted for nearly two years before the Holy Roman emperor, Charles le Gros (Charles the Fat), intervened and bought them off with £700 of silver — an astronomical sum at the time — complemented by a land grant at Rouen, on the condition that they leave Paris to the Parisians.

    When the Vikings arrived in Paris with an estimated 12,000 men on 300 ships, they simply requested free passage to sail further up the Seine. The authorities refused, and, for the following two years, mayhem and slaughter became the norm in and around Paris. When the dust finally settled, the Norseman appeared pleased with the gift of what would become the Duchy of Normandy. The Norman nation quickly prospered. Within two generations, all Normans spoke French and, a century later, in 1066, they conquered England, a nation whose people never managed to master French grammar. Nevertheless, centuries later, the British, possibly inspired by William the Conqueror, used their own ships to subject much of the world, including the Indian subcontinent and the east coast of North America, to their rule and their language.

    One protester who penetrated the Senate chambers donned an impressive costume inspired by Viking mythology. He sat down in the vice president’s chair. The latter-day Viking provided the imagery to make the event legitimately hyperreal. Whether last week’s assault turns into the equivalent of the Viking siege of Paris over the next two years remains to be seen. For one thing, we are all wondering what Donald the Fat will do after being released from the White House. Will his Vikings offer us a new episode of hyperreality TV or even a lambent civil war? Will Joe Biden befriend the evil Iranians? The world is waiting for the next episode. 

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

    The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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    Trump’s Impeachment Should Be Just the Beginning

    Let’s start with a little good news. It appears that a new US president will be inaugurated on January 20, and, when the Congress convenes for the first time after that, there will be a thin Democratic majority in both the House of Representatives and the Senate. Given what has transpired in America over the last four years and the desperate and violent acts at the US Capitol on January 6, this transfer of power may be enough to allow celebration for a moment that a majority of those who voted in the recent elections gave the nation a chance at governance.

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    However, neither a good government nor actual good governance is even close to being assured. First, there will be those, maybe President Biden himself, who will speak to a moderate response to what we have witnessed over the last days and years, and the terrible toll it has taken on so many people. I hope that voices of immoderation prevail when order is restored, at least until the seeds of public accountability have taken root. The good news will not last beyond the virtual inauguration parade unless the new president has nerves of steel and no, I repeat, no illusions about governing in partnership with Republicans in some faux display of “unity.”

    Immoderate Actions

    Moderated responses to immoderate actions are doomed to fail and serve only to further enable those willing to destroy to achieve their ends. In the instant case, there must be a quick and decisive immoderate response, albeit a non-violent response freed from revenge as its motive. That response must be seen as urgent and restorative. If not, this moment will be lost, and the nation will again descend into governmental dysfunction in the face of the multiple challenges of the pandemic, economic disarray, systemic racism and social injustice.

    Embed from Getty Images

    As we anticipate a new day dawning, one of the vestiges of days past should disappear from our discourse — the notion of alternate reality. Not only is there no such thing, but there cannot be such a thing, unless there are also alternate facts. There is reality and there is fantasy. When willful ingestion of fantasy overwhelms reality to drive political agendas and actions, you get the United States of America. It is simply time for this to end.

    The nation cannot expect to move forward while treading water beneath the surface. We must find a way to rescue those souls drowning in a sea of fantasy largely of their own making. I love the First Amendment, but this crucial foundation of America’s constitutional democracy was adopted in 1791. Other than falsely shouting “fire” in a crowded theater, there is little public knowledge about the limitations of free speech, including the extent to which provoking insurrection in a crowded city is protected by the First Amendment. Further, it bears noting that neither the internet nor social media was around in 1791, and that the First Amendment is a prohibition only of governmental activity even in its broadest reading.

    Without attempting a First Amendment primer, it is safe to say that a great many people in America’s delusional home of free speech believe that the right to freedom of speech is some kind of absolute. Since it is not an absolute and has next to nothing to do with private action, it should be safe to note that there is a lot of room to debate the extent to which America’s vile social media cesspool can be subject to limitation and control. Whatever else can be said, the First Amendment is not a license to monetize “free” speech, nor is it a shield that amoral peddlers of snake oil can use to avoid responsibility for the damage caused by their wares.

    Postmortem

    Since much of the fantasy at large in the land, including the fantasies that brought armed thugs to the US Capitol, has been well documented for quite some time, the postmortem review should take a hard look at why it took an armed insurrection to expose a fundamental flaw in the notion that “moderation” can be an effective response to venal delusion when that delusion takes hold in the body politic. And, further, it should consider why it took an armed insurrection to finally raise the stakes on those who generate, spread, consume and defend the fantasies.

    Then there is the tactical disconnect apparent in law enforcement planning and the initial response to what readily should have been seen as a clear and present threat of violence. A mob of white insurrectionists storms the Capitol, with little to no resistance. Meanwhile, pleas for assistance are slow-walked, and the insurrectionists are allowed to calmly walk away from the battered scene of their crime carrying their spoils of war. The inciter-in-chief is absent from the fray, watching it all on television, while his Marie Antoinette seem-a-like is finishing a White House furnishings photo shoot.

    So it goes in benighted America. I can hardly wait for the next Black Lives Matter protest that threatens prompt service at a coffee shop where the police move in to forcefully restore “law and order” at a point of a gun and arrest everyone who is black or cares about pervasive racism. Being a black protester in America just got even more perplexing. Perhaps the key to “peaceful” protest is to wrap yourself and your cause in the American flag or some flag-branded garb that says you and your cause are not a threat to law enforcement or to its cause.

    There finally may be enough palpable outrage among some in the nation’s political class, maybe enough to ensure the security of the presidential inauguration. Meanwhile, the scum is fleeing from Trump’s orbit, leaving in their wake a dysfunctional national government, over 380,000 coronavirus deaths, a vaccination free-for-all and ever-lengthening food lines. I hope that all will be investigated, their professional lives ruined and the guilty eventually charged. That is what accountability looks like to me.

    However, accountability cannot be complete until Donald Trump, his grifter family and his acolytes are driven from our midst, charged with crimes where applicable and shamed into irrelevance. Trump’s second impeachment should be just the beginning. That may seem immoderate, but so be it.

    *[This article was cross-posted on the author’s blog, Hard Left Turn.]

    The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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    in World Politics

    Recruiting an Army for a Civil War

    Last week’s storming of the Capitol has already achieved the traumatic status of only a few other events in recent US history: the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and 9/11. Its historical consequences will play out for years if not decades.

    Pearl Harbor allowed the United States into what until then had been largely a European conflict. The US subsequently became the dominant force in the Second World War and then the world, after ushering in the nuclear age with a shocking and scientifically sadistic attack on the civilian populations of two Japanese cities, Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The JFK assassination cleared the path for two other game-changing events: Lyndon Johnson’s war in Vietnam and the flowering of the hippie movement. Combined, these marked an important stage in shattering the trust Americans formerly had in their institutions, a trend that has continued ever since. 

    Flashpoint America: What the Hell Is Happening?

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    The attacks of 9/11 provided the scheming neocons and their pliant president, George W. Bush, with the pretext for spreading endless wars across the Middle East. It was designed as an intended display of virile might but turned into a failed and futile melodrama that, in the eyes of most of humanity, seriously undermined the vaunted moral authority of a nation that for two centuries had claimed to be the “beacon of democracy.”

    An article by Emma Grey Ellis in Wired, “The DC Mobs Could Become a Mythologized Recruitment Tool,” points to one of the possible long-term consequences of last week’s event. Ellis cites Shannon Reid, a researcher of the phenomenon of street gangs and white power at UNC Charlotte: “My fear is that this moment will die down and everyone will think we’re OK. Really this [riot] was a recruitment tool, a part of a mythology that is going to grow.”

    Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:

    Recruitment:

    Conversion to an extreme, violent ideology of people who realize — though with limited understanding — that the respectable institutions controlling their lives and to which they are expected to pledge allegiance have no interest in their well-being, and even less in recruiting them for gainful employment.

    Contextual Note

    One commentator cited in the article notes how an event that achieved nothing evokes a positive reaction from the extreme right, suggesting that “The hardened neo-Nazis on Telegram are over the moon that this all happened. They feel like it’s going to radicalize millions of boomer-tier people. They’re kind of scolding the boomers: ‘You tried to work through the system, but now you’re radicalized along with us.’”

    The FBI has now warned that thousands of Trump supporters and election deniers are currently organizing armed protests across the nation, seeking to make a furious show of force before Joe Biden’s inauguration. But they don’t see it as a one-time event. The movement will continue and possibly grow in the coming months. Its participants share a mentality of civil war. After four years of Trumpian fireworks in the media, these rebels — many of them well-trained war veterans inured to righteous violence — simply cannot imagine the nation in the hands of someone other than The Donald, who in their eyes has become the symbol of American assertiveness.

    Embed from Getty Images

    Sociologist Cynthia Miller-Idriss sees this event as confirming “a swing back toward anti-government extremism.” She believes it is “creating odd coalitions.” With his usual reflexive mendacity, when Trump sought to blame antifa for the storming of the Capitol, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy immediately contradicted him. Nevertheless, while it is unlikely that antifa and the MAGA crowd could ever agree on coordinating their studied nihilism, a certain convergence in their mutual capacity for discord seems possible.

    The main victims of the growing disorder will be the vast majority of Americans and, more particularly, the significant swaths of the population who are seriously interested in reforming, if not transforming, a system whose injustices seem patent and the indifference of the moneyed elites only too evident. The entire black and Hispanic communities will be the first to suffer since the most likely immediate response will be to impose heightened surveillance and more aggressive policing in the name of national security, following the precedent of 9/11.

    The hopes that were awakened last year with the popularity of the Black Lives Matter movement following the death of George Floyd will be dashed by the combined force of COVID-19, tightened security and official suspicion of anything that isn’t resolutely middle-of-the-road during the Biden presidency.

    Racial injustice and wealth inequality will be put on the back burner. That should surprise no one, but the coronavirus crisis and the George Floyd protests led many to believe that some form of positive change was about to emerge. For once, the government seemed to show awareness of the needs of a population that the pandemic had cast into the gulf of uncertainty created by unbridled free market capitalism. 

    The Biden administration will immediately focus on the evident danger of right-wing radicalism that drew its energy from the personality of Donald Trump but has now achieved a life of its own. But an aggressive attempt to throttle it may aggravate its attraction. Right-wing militias are more the symptom than the problem. The deeper issue lies in the fact that a significant portion of the population places more of its hope in hard drugs, opioids, suicide missions and the rage of the mob than it does in government reforms.

    Historical Note

    Pearl Harbor in 1941 and the 9/11 attacks 60 years later had the effect of immediately designating an enemy Americans felt must be countered with force. The Japanese attack provided the US with a ticket to a world war that had started in Europe. From then on, it concerned the entire Northern Hemisphere. In a similar fashion, 9/11 provided the pretext for an undefined global war on terror that has prolonged its effects in both violent and profoundly insidious ways ever since, sapping the nation’s morale.

    The JFK assassination is the outlier in that series of traumatic events. What happened in Dallas in November 1963 was engineered to appear as a purely domestic murder mystery. By focusing on a single designated killer, it succeeded in masking its true historical significance. Nevertheless, the Kennedy assassination produced a powerful effect on the international as well as the domestic front. It cleared the path for the Vietnam War. The combined force of the assassination and the war stimulated the creation of a counterculture that turned many of the reigning values in US society on their head.

    As the year 2021 begins, marked by nervous anticipation of Joe Biden’s arrival at the White House, the consequences and eventual lessons of last week’s insurrection will begin to emerge. At the time of this writing, the FBI is anticipating violence in all 50 states. Where that will lead, nobody knows. At the same time, the stability of both political parties appears to be seriously compromised. It will take months and perhaps years to assess the consequences of what may become known as Trump’s last stand.

    Commentators, even those favorable to the Republicans, admit that this is the one event history is likely to associate with Donald Trump’s presidency. Others fear that the events of January 6 were simply the initial skirmish of a struggle that will play out with growing anarchy over the months and even years to come, in what may be a muted civil war.

    Some specific issues related to the riot will undoubtedly be addressed. Action will be taken to strengthen the protocols for the protection of public sites. The behavior and training of law enforcement and security personnel will be reviewed once again. But any of the specific issues will pale in significance to the growing awareness of the studied indifference to the concerns of the people on the part of those who make the laws, to say nothing of their corrupt complicity with the moneyed interests that have the means to influence, if not dictate, the laws. Given their level of education, the team Joe Biden has recruited should have the intellectual capacity to grasp these issues. Will it be able to summon the resolve to deal with them?

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

    The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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    in World Politics

    Flashpoint America: What the Hell Is Happening?

    What the hell is happening in the US? Let’s rattle off some of the obvious: political intractability, sectarian entrenchment, tribal mentality, partisan violence, radicalization, conspiracy theories, reality deficits and even an attempted coup d’état. As strategic intelligence and foreign policy professionals, most of us have spent our careers assessing conditions abroad. What we commonly look to identify are the political, security and economic environment that allows us to measure the relative stability of a specific country or region.

    From there, we develop baselines that hypothetically stress these conditions, indicating the potential for instability. When these conditions exist in prolonged disparity, indicators and warnings start to present themselves. Sometimes, they are glaring and obvious; other times, they are subtle and nuanced. Nonetheless, it is safe to say that the indicators and warnings have been flashing red for some time in the United States.

    A Perspective on America’s Imperfect Democracy

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    This is not to say that domestic intelligence and policy professionals spread across federal and local law enforcement were completely oblivious to them but rather that self-assessment is the hardest form of assessment. Americans typically lack the ability to reflect inward and analyze their own biases, prejudices and subjectivity against the prevailing political, security and economic conditions, especially at home. The January 6 attack on the US Capitol proved this.

    Knowing this — even when we won’t admit it — what are we looking for as we assess this new political and security reality? Nothing has changed the underlying conditions between the storming of US Congress and today, and with a third of Trump voters claiming sympathy with the attempted coup, we’re in for a rough road ahead. Assessing this situation as strategic intelligence and foreign policy professionals, however, gives us some insight to help structure our thinking for what might come next.

    Political Intractability

    Countries manifesting instability have moved past the point of political entrenchment into the realm of political intractability. The former is used by politicians seeking to legislate by obstruction, while the latter is driven by underlying grievances that have become too extreme to resolve. With millions of Trump loyalists and Republican lawmakers still beholden to a president who refuses to concede his defeat in a fair election, there are not many opportunities to seek effective political resolution — especially when one side refuses to accept the legitimacy of the incoming administration.

    Democrats, on the other hand, are completely resolute in their plans to impeach Trump and remove him from office with little more than a week to go before his term officially ends. Neither party is willing to back down, and there is no mechanism at any level seeking meaningful de-escalation. This means tensions will remain elevated, grievances solidified and positions hardened, giving leaders on both sides an inordinate amount of power to antagonize around their own political goals and objectives. As we saw last week, the destructive power of this can be harnessed and directed with relative ease. 

    Law Enforcement Failures

    One of the measurements we always gauge stability against is the competency of the security forces, including law enforcement and the military. There were so many law-enforcement and intelligence failures last week, that it is almost impossible to pick a starting point. In fact, one could make the argument that the failures were so extreme as to suggest complicity, which might prove true in time.

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    As we now know, intelligence was discarded and ignored. In just one example, an FBI field office in Virginia issued an internal memo on January 5, warning that radicalized extremists were headed to the capital to commit “war.” As The Washington Post reported, “Yet even with that information in hand, the report’s unidentified author expressed concern that the FBI might be encroaching on free speech rights.” The shocking implicit bias inherent in the author’s assessment points to the absolute failure in accurately identifying contemporary threats of this nature.

    In addition, there are now currently two Capitol Police officers suspended and 10 more under investigation. We have all seen the videos of cops taking selfies with the rioters, opening gates and providing assistance in the halls of Congress. This failure is not just tactical. It would be naive to believe that the same politics that powered the events of January 6 are not working their way through law enforcement agencies across the country — more so since Trump has unreservedly backed the police during the Black Lives Matter protests this summer. It is, therefore, hardly surprising that cops from Virginia, Washington and Pennsylvania are currently under investigation for being part of the Capitol Hill insurrection.

    Reality Deficits

    Communications and the media, especially when it comes to social networking platforms, are the forward edge of all modern conflict dynamics and play a key role in the stability of a nation in crisis, either reassuring anxious citizens or agitating the same population into action. We are now locked into an endless cycle of misinformation, disinformation and propaganda, pushed by media channels and social networks that are fueling vast conspiracy theories such as QAnon. These so-called filter bubbles have become so extreme that they have distorted reality, compelled radicalization and created an echo-chamber lifestyle for those who feel politically disposed of.

    Politicians openly supporting QAnon have been voted into office. One such politician has even been accused of tweeting the exact location of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi during the storming of Congress. Unfortunately, as we learned during the propaganda war with the Islamic State, the advantage is always with the home team. While shutting down social media channels is a temporary solution, it does not address the root causes of radicalization and only increases the sense of grievance, forcing these networks into new digital spaces that are harder to monitor. Indeed, since last Wednesday, extremists have already moved to encrypted messaging apps like Telegram to plan new actions ahead of Joe Biden’s inauguration next week.

    White Supremacy

    Assessing ideologies unique to specific countries and regions is an important tool in measuring stability. Here in the US, there is no more malignant and pervasive ideology than white supremacy. There is a reason why newly elected Republican Representative Mary Miller, one day before the coup, felt comfortable giving a speech on the steps of Congress positively referencing Adolf Hitler.

    Everything that cascades from white supremacy, including white grievance, remains the single largest threat the US currently faces. In a report from October, the Department of Homeland Security said that white supremacists “remain the most persistent and lethal threat in the homeland.” In November, the Center for Strategic and International Studies published a report identifying that 41 of 61 terrorist plots and attacks recorded in the first eight months of this year were perpetrated by white supremacists. All of this indicates that right-wing extremists continue to have the motivation to plan and execute acts of violence.

    Since President Donald Trump is heavily invested in the politics of white supremacy and, given the intersection it shares with conspiracy theories over his election loss, there is nothing to suggest that this kind of extremist violence will abate any time soon. Furthermore, law enforcement does not have a particularly strong track record in disrupting threats that originate with white supremacist groups, even going back to the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in 2017. This is in stark contrast to the nearly 1,000 recorded incidents of police violence against the Black Lives Matter protesters just last summer, indicating a heavy bias in assessing threats from groups such as these.

    Economic Hardship

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    Economic anxiety is a potent motivator in driving instability, if not its single most important indicator. It is important to remember that the events on Capitol Hill took place against the backdrop of the pandemic, economic hardship and a government paralyzed by intractability. Almost 22 million Americans have lost their jobs due to COVID-19, and the Pew Research Center found at the end of September that half of those people still remain unemployed.

    While the coronavirus remains politically neutral, the economic messaging between the two sides has been deeply partisan and tribal, casting both as victims of the other. Nothing raises the stakes for instability like people believing their lost livelihood is the fault of another group. Combine this with the government’s horrifying mismanagement of the pandemic, a nonsensical economic assistance package and ongoing conspiracies surrounding the virus, and you have all of the ingredients for continued tensions and hostility among different factions of the political spectrum.

    There are traditions and customs that have proven effective against future instability. These include the military acknowledging the rightful transition of power, the courts upholding the rule of law and election officials not succumbing to executive pressure to alter election results. But these safeguards are only as good as the people behind them, and without any national platform to de-escalate and with tensions at this level, the potential for overreach and miscalculation is unavoidable. Should there be another spectacular event like the coup attempt of January 6, then groups on both sides will retreat deeper into fringe positions where their only recourse will be more violence as a means of perceived self-protection.

    Each of these indicators and their subsequent warnings alone would be enough to raise the worry levels of a strategic intelligence or foreign policy professional assessing a volatile situation abroad. Unfortunately for us, this time, the turbulence is not in some faraway place, but at home.

    The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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    in World Politics

    Brexit Trade Deal Brings Temporary, If Not Lasting, Relief

    “What we call the beginning is often the end / And to make an end is to make a beginning.” So said Ursula van der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, announcing the completion of Brexit negotiations on Christmas Eve, quoting from T.S. Eliot’s “Little Gidding,” the final quartet of his last great poem. Van der Leyen’s words perfectly capture the defining trait of the EU-UK Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA): It is a platform for further ambition in cross-border partnership between the UK and EU rather than a ceiling on current ambitions.

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    Relief was the predominant emotion amongst the business community on both sides of the Channel before the New Year. Now that the dust has settled and attention has turned to the detail of the deal reached, there should be no illusions that the TCA ends EU-UK negotiations. We set out below what, in high-level terms, the TCA means for EU-UK trade in goods and services, and where there are gaps to fill and questions to still be answered over the coming months and years.

    What Does the TCA Mean for Trade in Goods?

    Firstly, the good news. Under the TCA, there are no tariffs or quotas on cross-border trade in qualifying goods between the United Kingdom and the European Union. In this regard, the TCA goes further than any EU trade agreement negotiated with a third country. This is a hugely positive outcome for businesses with UK and EU supply chains, particularly in sectors such as the automotive and agri-food industries, where tariffs imposed on so-called World Trade Organization terms under a no-deal Brexit would have been high.  

    However, it is crucial for those involved in cross-border trade to appreciate that only goods that are of EU or UK origin benefit from zero tariffs and zero quotas under the TCA. Rules of origin are a key component of every trade agreement and determine the “economic nationality” of products. Under the TCA, a product will attract a tariff if a certain percentage (beyond a “tolerance level”) of its pre-finished value or components are not of either UK or EU origin. The tolerance levels vary from product to product and require careful analysis. Therefore, businesses will need to understand the originating status of all the goods they trade between the UK and the EU to ensure they benefit from the zero tariffs and quotas under the agreement. Businesses will also need to ensure that their supply chains understand the new self-certification procedures to prove the origin of goods.

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    Beyond the qualified good news on tariffs and quotas, the deal is less helpful in that full regulatory approvals are required for goods being imported into the EU from the UK and vice versa. While in certain important sectors (automotive, chemicals and pharmaceuticals) the UK and the EU agreed on specific rules to reduce technical barriers to trade, the UK government did not achieve its longstanding negotiating objective of securing broad mutual recognition on product standards.

    Therefore, from January 1, 2021, all products exported from the EU to the UK will have to comply with the UK’s technical regulations and will be subject to any applicable regulatory compliance checks and controls. Similarly, all products imported from the UK to the EU will need to comply with EU technical regulations and will be subject to all applicable regulatory compliance obligations, checks and controls.

    There will also be specific changes to food and plant safety standards under the TCA. UK agri-food exporters will have to meet all EU sanitary and phytosanitary (SPS) import requirements with immediate effect. In this sector, UK exports will be subject to official controls carried out by member state authorities at border control posts. Similarly, EU agri-food exporters will have to meet all UK SPS import requirements, following certain phase-in periods the UK government has provided.

    Far from being a “bonfire of red tape” promised by certain advocates of Brexit before the 2016 referendum, the TCA introduces a “bonanza of new red tape” for businesses who wish to sell their products in both UK and EU markets. On January 8, UK Cabinet Office minister, Michael Gove, acknowledged that there would be “significant additional disruption” at UK borders over the coming weeks as a result of customs changes and regulatory checks.

    What Does the TCA Mean for Trade in Services?

    As has been widely noted by commentators, the deal on services is far thinner than on goods. More than 40% of the UK’s exports to the EU are services, and the sector accounts for around 80% of the UK’s economic activity. As an inevitable consequence of leaving the EU single market, UK service suppliers will lose their automatic right to offer services across the union. UK business will have to comply with a patchwork of complex host-country rules which vary from country to country and may need to establish themselves in the EU to continue operating. Many have already done so.

    The level of market access will also depend on the way the service is supplied. There are four “modes” for this. Services can be supplied on a cross-border basis from the home country of the supplier, for example over the internet; to the consumer in the country of the supplier, such as a tourist traveling abroad and purchasing services; via a locally-established enterprise owned by the foreign service supplier; or through the temporary presence in the territory of another country by a service supplier who is a natural person.

    All of this means that UK-established businesses will need to look at domestic regulations on service access in each EU member state in which they seek to operate, and vice versa for EU-established businesses seeking market access in the UK.

    A Basis for Ongoing Negotiations

    The TCA does not mark the end of EU-UK negotiations, and in some areas these discussions start immediately. For example, the agreement has provided an end to so-called passporting of financial services under which banks, insurers and other financial service firms authorized in the UK had automatic right to access EU markets and vice versa.

    The EU and the UK have committed to agree on a memorandum of understanding that will establish a framework of regulatory cooperation in financial services by March this year. With an end to passporting, it is likely that there will be more friction in cross-border financial services, but the extent of that friction depends on the outcome of future negotiations between EU and UK governments and regulators.

    To take another example of importance to the UK economy, the TCA does not provide for the automatic mutual recognition of professional qualifications. As of January 1, UK nationals, irrespective of where they acquired their qualifications, and EU citizens with qualifications acquired in the UK, will need to have their qualifications recognized in the relevant EU member state on the basis of that state’s domestic rules. However, the TCA leaves the door open for the EU and the UK to agree on additional arrangements in the future for the mutual recognition of qualifications, something that professional bodies will be pushing for immediately.

    Whilst there has been understandable relief from politicians, businesses and populations on both sides of the Channel suffering from Brexit fatigue that a deal — any deal — has been reached, the sheer extent to which the TCA envisages ongoing negotiations between the UK and the EU on issues both large and small over the months and years ahead has not been widely appreciated.

    The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More