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    Biden’s Hyperbolic Fawning Before the CIA

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      Biden’s America and MBS’s Saudi Arabia: Is Diplomacy Possible?

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      The Fair Observer website uses digital cookies so it can collect statistics on how many visitors come to the site, what content is viewed and for how long, and the general location of the computer network of the visitor. These statistics are collected and processed using the Google Analytics service. Fair Observer uses these aggregate statistics from website visits to help improve the content of the website and to provide regular reports to our current and future donors and funding organizations. The type of digital cookie information collected during your visit and any derived data cannot be used or combined with other information to personally identify you. Fair Observer does not use personal data collected from its website for advertising purposes or to market to you.As a convenience to you, Fair Observer provides buttons that link to popular social media sites, called social sharing buttons, to help you share Fair Observer content and your comments and opinions about it on these social media sites. These social sharing buttons are provided by and are part of these social media sites. They may collect and use personal data as described in their respective policies. Fair Observer does not receive personal data from your use of these social sharing buttons. It is not necessary that you use these buttons to read Fair Observer content or to share on social media. More

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      Biden’s Golden Opportunity to Reverse Course on China

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      The Fair Observer website uses digital cookies so it can collect statistics on how many visitors come to the site, what content is viewed and for how long, and the general location of the computer network of the visitor. These statistics are collected and processed using the Google Analytics service. Fair Observer uses these aggregate statistics from website visits to help improve the content of the website and to provide regular reports to our current and future donors and funding organizations. The type of digital cookie information collected during your visit and any derived data cannot be used or combined with other information to personally identify you. Fair Observer does not use personal data collected from its website for advertising purposes or to market to you.As a convenience to you, Fair Observer provides buttons that link to popular social media sites, called social sharing buttons, to help you share Fair Observer content and your comments and opinions about it on these social media sites. These social sharing buttons are provided by and are part of these social media sites. They may collect and use personal data as described in their respective policies. Fair Observer does not receive personal data from your use of these social sharing buttons. It is not necessary that you use these buttons to read Fair Observer content or to share on social media. More

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      The Sad Reality of US Dealmaking

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      The fallout from US President Joe Biden’s week in Europe has just begun. There was no dramatic moment that sums it up, though the media vaguely hoped the one-on-one with Russian President Vladimir Putin might produce something akin to the jabs, uppercuts and right crosses of Rocky Balboa vs. Ivan Drago in their opening round. But there was nothing to see. The fight wasn’t televised and Biden carefully avoided the risk of seeing both on stage in a joint press conference.

      Though no spectacular shift in US–Russia relations will likely appear in the months ahead as a result of the encounter, some aspects of Biden’s performance concerning the posture and attitude of the US on the world stage may prove pivotal. Biden’s actions and rhetoric in Europe have contributed in significant ways both to defining his presidential legacy and clarifying the shifting vocation of the US in a world that has become far more complex than the one previous presidents had to deal with.

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      Biden seems to realize it as he frequently refers to this moment of history as an “inflection point.” He’s right, though he seems to have seriously misjudged the nature of the tectonic shift the world is undergoing. Biden defines such inflection points as “moments in time when we’ve made hard decisions about who we are.” But the era in which presidential decisions in themselves constituted historical inflection points probably ended in March 2003, when the US, under George W. Bush, invaded Iraq. Forces were then unleashed that no longer await presidential decisions. Powerful undercurrents of history, the economy and of nature itself — all beyond any politician’s control — have been fueling the largely unmanageable force behind today’s inflection.

      Jonathan Lemire and Aamer Madhani are the authors of an AP article that focuses on Biden as America’s pitchman to the rest of the world. The title of the article is: “Biden Abroad: Pitching America to Welcoming If Wary Allies.” Reduced to its essence, Biden’s pitch consisted of reassuring his allies that he can be trusted simply because he is not Donald Trump, even though his policies have shown little indication of breaking with the former president’s innovations.

      Embed from Getty Images

      The world remembers Biden’s previous boss, Barack Obama, who before his election in 2008 claimed to represent a radical shift away from everything that Bush stood for. He even convinced the Nobel committee he was a prince of peace. Once in office, Obama prolonged most of Bush’s policies, including foreign wars, reinforcing the surveillance state and maintaining tax cuts for the wealthy, all of which imperiled the economy itself, leading to the 2008 financial crisis that he was tasked with solving.

      Lemire and Madhani note that whilst the allies in the G7 appeared relieved by the feeling that there was now “a steady hand at the wheel,” they were far from convinced that the US was permanently back on an even keel. They did end up agreeing to the general drift of Biden’s campaign to highlight the opposition between democracy (the West) and autocracy (China and Russia). 

      At the same time, the authors remarked that “Germany, Italy and the representatives for the European Union [were] reluctant to call out China, a valuable trading partner, too harshly.” More significantly, they noted that there was “a wariness in some European capitals that it was Biden, rather than Trump, who was the aberration to American foreign policy and that the United States could soon fall back into a transactional, largely inward-looking approach.”

      Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:

      Transactional:

      An adjective that describes not only the willingness to make deals with others, but also the refusal to recognize the existence of anything other than calculation of individual interest in the conduct of one’s affairs and relationships even with permanent partners and allies.

      Contextual Note

      After his meeting with Putin, Biden declared: “This is not about trust. This is about self-interest and verification of self-interest.” He needed to reassure the American electorate that, unlike Trump, he had nothing but mistrust for Putin. But he may have been signaling what most Americans always want to hear: that nobody should be trusted, because all relationships begin — and most end — with the assertion of self-interest. America’s European allies have understood that, despite protestations of solid alliances, special relationships and undying friendship, Trump’s approach of reducing everything to a transactional deal was a true description of the reality of US policy under every recent president.

      The language used by the media demonstrates this reality with some clarity. The AP journalists already described Biden’s action as “pitching America.” In an article with the title, “Biden Struggles to Sell Democracy Abroad When It Faces Challenges at Home,” The Washington Post described Biden’s behavior in Europe to that of a street barker. “But then, like any good pitchman, Biden quickly regained his footing,” the Post reports. Diplomacy always involves self-interest and always contains an agenda, but when it consistently appears as a pitch, potential customers begin to doubt the sincerity. The authors of the AP article make it clear that, however persuasive the pitch, Biden has not yet closed any deal. They even seem to doubt one is likely.

      Historical Note

      Writing for Spectator World, historian Andrew Bacevich commented that Joe Biden’s premise concerning US leadership of democratically-inclined allies sounds like a desire to return to an imagined status quo that, following the collapse of the Soviet Union, appeared to be heralding what George H.W. Bush called “a new world order.” But in this century, history has moved on in ways Biden and most American politicians appear either not to have noticed or persist in willingly ignoring. “The idea that a US-led bloc of Western nations will determine the future of the planet will become increasingly implausible,” Bacevich explains.

      The historian puts in perspective Biden’s insistence on managing an inflection point: “While repeatedly insisting that history had reached ‘an inflection point’, he simultaneously reiterated the claim made by every US president since Harry Truman (Trump excepted) that ‘the partnership between Europe and the United States’ will determine the fate of humankind.”

      The G7 is that partnership, which now includes Japan. But the fate of humankind will rely on the interplay of forces that no single nation or group of nations controls. If there were a way of getting humankind itself into the picture through, say, a global democratic revolution that respects the classic democratic dictum of one man, one vote, the combat to promote democracy over autocracy might make some sense. But that is on no one’s agenda. The degree of inequality between nations and within nations may now have reached a point of no return.

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      Trump’s presidency taught the Europeans about the dangers of getting on board with grand US-led projects. They are beyond risky. The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), even more than the Paris climate accord, provides a perfect example. At a truly interesting historical moment marked by the election this weekend of a new president in Iran, the US actually has an opportunity to push toward a solution that would involve reconciling a number of competing interests stretching across a wide expanse of the globe.

      The New York Times believes that the election of Ebrahim Raisi as Iran’s new president may be the perfect opportunity for Biden. Its reasoning makes sense. If Raisi makes the concessions necessary to remove US sanctions, Iranians will have the hope of returning to a prosperous economy. Still, the heritage of Donald Trump has seriously weakened US credibility. “The Iranians have demanded a written commitment that no future American government could scrap the deal as Mr. Trump did,” the Times reports. “They want something permanent — ‘a reasonable-sounding demand,’ in the words of one senior American official, ‘that no real democracy can make.’”

      What the official means is that a real democracy could make that “reasonable-sounding demand,” but not the US version of democracy. The Times explains: “Mr. Biden, like President Barack Obama before him, could never have gotten the consent of two-thirds of the U.S. Senate. So it is termed an ‘executive agreement’ that any future president could reverse, just as Mr. Trump did.”

      Bacevich is right. The US, even with Europe, cannot “determine the future of the planet.” It can’t even define a line of policy that will hold for more than four years. The most powerful nation in the world is also the most powerless.

      *[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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      Biden’s Binary Battle Against Putin

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      Well before his trip to Europe, Joe Biden’s team worked out the strategy for its messaging that would color everything connected to foreign policy. Vox summed up the drift with this title: “Biden sees his presidency as proving democracy — not authoritarianism — right for the world.” It is now common for pundits to lament that democracy appears to be under threat, though few agree on the nature of that threat.

      Just as during the Cold War, the US understands the marketing advantage of casting its global mission in binary terms. But this time, instead of communism vs. capitalism, the contrast is between democracy and authoritarianism. The average political consumer will immediately see it as a real and significant choice. In reality, there will always be a third and fourth choice, but deliberating on those choices requires serious thinking. The third choice is neither, which means rejecting both as insufficient. The fourth is something in between, which is what most European nations chose following World War II.

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      Faced with the binary choice, nearly everyone besides autocrats themselves will spontaneously choose democracy. But choosing the side that calls itself democratic doesn’t mean that one has chosen democracy. It means one has chosen the side that claims to represent democracy. Like any set of ideas, democracy can be a coherent philosophy accompanied by an ethical system of thought or a mere slogan. In the land of P.T. Barnum and Edward Bernays, the father of public relations, one can never be absolutely sure.

      The Biden administration has clearly understood the advantages of the binary strategy. It is even more compelling in the light of the ostentatious assault on democracy conducted by President Biden’s predecessor, Donald Trump. The Trump loyalists who complain of a stolen election are clearly a minority, but they remain a significant minority, capable of doing extensive damage. They further weaken the already fragile belief that the US electoral system embodies true democratic values. They offer a glaring example to the rest of the world of virulently anti-democratic behavior. They confirm the image many people have of a culture so obsessed with winning that it could never tolerate the give-and-take that democracy implies.

      Following Biden’s arrival in England for the G7 conference, The New York Times reported that the US president “has made challenging a rising China and a disruptive Russia the centerpiece of a foreign policy designed to build up democracies around the world as a bulwark against spreading authoritarianism.”

      Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:

      Authoritarianism:

      The epithet commonly attributed by one political authority, whose power derives from a sense of obedience to a particular group of interests, to another political authority who responds to a different group of interests

      Contextual Note

      In today’s remake of the Cold War — which, in many ways, resembles more the facades of a Hollywood set than it does the decades-long historical standoff between the US and the Soviet Union — Biden desperately needed to define a similar ideological split, even though the entire world had fallen into the global political and economic culture imposed by the US. Guided by his political marketers, the 78-year-old could appreciate that the winning formula from the 1950s and 1960s might still resonate with his countrymen. After all, Trump earned his victory in 2016 by exploiting the implicit nostalgia for the post-war years of prosperity with his motto, “Make America Great Again.” Americans have been conditioned to think of the 1950s as their golden age.

      Embed from Getty Images

      This idea has been brewing in the Biden administration for some time as the president’s way of defining his mission in the world. As the Times remarks, “Mr. Biden has argued that the world is at an ‘inflection point,’ with an existential battle underway between democracy and autocracy.” What was once capitalism vs. communism has become democracy vs. autocracy. 

      It may seem paradoxical that following his meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Geneva on June 16, Biden described Putin’s state of mind in these terms: “The last thing he wants now is a Cold War.” This sounds reassuring. Could it mean that the new cold war is over? It is more likely that, once back on terra firma in the US, Biden will return to his theme of the Russian threat, warning that you can never trust Russian leaders. He will certainly boast of his diplomatic accomplishment, lowering the temperature, while seizing on the first occasion that presents itself to accuse Russia of not keeping its promises.

      For the moment, the vibes produced by the Geneva summit appear positive, positive enough in any case to leave The New York Times unsure of how to characterize the meeting. The Times journalists highlight Putin’s assertions of good intentions, but they leave considerable space for doubt about any concrete future outcome when they write: “Mr. Putin said he was ready for talks with the United States, and he voiced unusual optimism about the possibility of achieving results.” “Unusual” was the required epithet, meaning that any hope of actually achieving results should, in the readers’ minds, remain doubtful. The fact that dialogue exists, nevertheless, stands as a very real victory for Biden, if only as a contrast with Trump’s confrontational approach to diplomacy.

      The article concludes by highlighting Putin’s literary culture, who cited Leo Tolstoy to sum up the outcome of the summit. “There is no happiness in life — there are only glimmers of it.” For Americans, who believe in their absolute right to the “pursuit of happiness,” this will be seen as a typical example of Russian fatalistic pessimism, something that Americans, whose culture celebrates optimism, will never accept. It has its literary charm, but it lacks the pizazz of Yankee ambition.

      Historical Note

      Most serious observers today are aware of a deep crisis of Western democracy, a more than two-century-old experiment that sought to demonstrate the possibility of creating and maintaining a government responsive to the people rather than as the privileged tool of a ruling class. The US and other Western countries have recently been faced with the confusion associated with the rise of populism, both on the left and the right.

      Populist movements are suspicious of those who have assumed the habit of governing, whatever their declared political orientation. Not only do they appear self-interested, but they are also seen as the hypocritical puppets of an obscurely perceived oligarchical class. The populists are right to suppose that there is more to the exercise of power than appears in the discourse of the power-wielding politicians. They call it the “deep state” and imagine it as a kind of dark well whose depth is unknown but can only be speculated about.

      Today’s version of capitalism is less industrial than purely financial. That means that power will always be measured by the ability of those who exercise or influence power to pay for what they want. In such a system, can democracy as 18th-century Enlightenment thinkers imagined it still have any meaning? A famous Princeton study published in 2014 describes the reality of decision-making today and calls the political system an oligarchy. “In the United States, our findings indicate, the majority does not rule.” It notes that “policymaking is dominated by powerful business organizations and a small number of affluent Americans.” It concludes that “America’s claims to being a democratic society are seriously threatened.”

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      The Balance website characterizes oligarchy in these terms: “Oligarchs only associate with others who share those same traits. They become an organized minority, while average citizens remain an unorganized majority. The oligarchs groom protégés who share their values and goals. It becomes more difficult for the average person to break into the group of elites.” That would appear to be a more accurate description of US politics today than the romantic idea of Jeffersonian democracy or Abraham Lincoln’s “government of the people, by the people and for the people.”

      Then comes the question: Is an oligarchy authoritarian? No, because there is no single decision-maker or institution capable of defining government policy. But neither is it a democracy. If he wished to be honest, perhaps Joe Biden should characterize the combat for the future as a contest between oligarchy and autocracy. The problem: It doesn’t sound convincing to Americans, who still feel an atavistic attachment to the idea of democracy.

      *[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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      Biden’s America Is the New “Middle Kingdom”

      by

      For decades, The New York Times has tried to manage the image it once created for itself as a “progressive” newspaper. On various occasions, its ineptness at this game has been so patent that its reputation as the “paper of record” appeared irreparably tarnished. Its support of George W. Bush’s campaign to invade Iraq in 2003 is just one prominent example. Nevertheless, since no other US newspaper can compete with its brand, The Times not only holds pole position in reporting the news but is also assured of winning the race on most headline political stories in the US news cycle.

      Thanks to its stable of high-profile editorialists, its specially cultivated relationship with government insiders and the intelligence community, and its occasionally thought-provoking in-depth features, The Times commands the respect of an elite, “politically-aware” class of readers. Even when the paper’s editorial stance appears totally skewed on a major issue, its position will be deemed worthy of attention. Despite multiple failures, this particularly applies to US foreign policy.

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      The key to The Times maintaining its image as a voice of progressive values lies less in its willingness to air progressive ideas than in the persistent belief Americans have that the Democratic Party is more progressive than the Republican Party. In other words, because Democrats read The Times, it has no need to sound progressive. Like the Democratic Party itself, The Times’ editorial policy over at least the past three decades has increasingly distanced itself from most traditional progressive themes, particularly on foreign policy.

      Still, the newspaper feels the need to at least seem progressive. It finds itself faced the difficult task of navigating very real pressures within the Democratic Party. With the arrival of a new Democratic administration and the continued suspense concerning what its policies will actually look like, The New York Times is now making an effort to assess the trends.

      In an article on March 11, Michael D. Shear, Carl Hulse and Jonathan Martin provide an example of tracking the trends. “Even as Mr. Biden’s stimulus victory lap will be embraced by the left,” they write, “he remains in the cautious middle so far on foreign policy, easing off on punishing the crown prince of Saudi Arabia for ordering the killing of a Washington Post journalist and imposing only modest sanctions on Russia for the poisoning and jailing of Aleksei A. Navalny, the opposition leader there.”

      Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:

      Cautious middle:

      The position that defines how Democratic politicians may hold onto power and mainstream journalists hold onto their jobs. Only Republicans politicians and journalists may be allowed to deviate from it.

      Contextual Note

      Citing the notion of cautious middle would seem to imply that, in contrast, there may also be an incautious middle. But the concept is difficult to imagine. The expression sounds like a pleonasm. The whole point of placing oneself in the middle is to avoid being conspicuous. This raises the question of what The Times means by “cautious.” Does caution mean using one’s rational faculties to steer clear of danger, or does it signify abandoning one’s own principles and beliefs for the sake of survival?

      The two cases cited leave the reader wondering. President Joe Biden has promised no punishment for Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), whom the CIA blames as the man directly responsible for the murder of US resident Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi journalist who worked for The Washington Post. In contrast, Biden has imposed “modest sanctions” on President Vladimir Putin’s government and directly maligned Putin himself for the poisoning of a Russian citizen with no connections to the US. Does Biden think MBS has a soul? How afraid is Biden of Saudi Arabia? Should this really be called caution?

      Then there is the question of defining what The Times means by “the middle”? When polls show that a significant majority of Americans wish to see single-payer health care, the withdrawal of US troops from the Middle East, a $15 minimum wage and increased taxes on the wealthy, does it have any meaning to call Biden’s position — who appears to oppose all of these issues — “the cautious middle”? Perhaps The Times imagines Biden’s foreign policy position should be called “the cautious middle” because it sits somewhere between MBS and Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu, or between India’s Narendra Modi and the UK’s Boris Johnson.

      Historical Note

      The independent journalist Matt Taibbi, who has never sought the middle but always taken seriously the notion that the media’s first responsibility in a democracy is to stand up to power and challenge its orientations, has noticed how, with the arrival of Joe Biden in the White House, most of the press — and in particular The New York Times and the Washington Post — have abandoned any pretense of critical appraisal of the sometimes incomprehensible caution of the new administration. He compares their reporting to “embarrassing, Soviet-style contortions,” bordering on hagiography.

      He notes how Biden and his Democratic colleagues are not alone in seeking shelter within the “cautious middle.” So are most journalists, even Republican stalwarts working for the media. He cites the case of New York Times conservative columnist David Brooks who, as a philosophically-focused Republican, “spent his career penning paeans to ‘personal responsibility’ and the ‘culture of thrift,’ but is now writing stories about how ‘Joe Biden is a transformational president’ for casting aside fiscal restraints in the massive Covid-19 bill.”

      Embed from Getty Images

      Taibbi speculates that Brooks may be undergoing the same “evolution” as Biden, leading him to some kind of safe haven where those who have some power over his future — his employer, The New York Times — want to be sure he will not deviate from the party line. Taibbi compares Brooks to a lot of people in the corporate press “who are searching out the safest places on the op-ed page, the middle of the newsroom middle, in desperate efforts to stay on the masthead.”

      Being in the cautious middle is now perceived by many to be the key to survival in the new political-media complex, even if being in the middle rhymes with irrelevance, inefficacy and refusal to implement or even take into account the will of people. The political middle is no longer the position in the center of people’s real interests or even of the spectrum of popular opinion. The middle appears to exist as a theoretical point of absolute stasis in which changing as little as possible while finding ways to reassure the discontents by acts of verbal bravado defines a decent strategy of governance.

      In 2008, Barack Obama ran as the anti-George W. Bush candidate. Once in office, Obama maintained most of Bush’s heritage, from disastrous tax cuts for the rich to maintaining and prolonging the Bush wars that he had railed against. Biden has come into office as the anti-Donald Trump, ready to bring things back to a middling “normal” presumably defined by the status quo of the Obama period. Just like Obama, President Biden appears to have accepted the new “middle” defined by his predecessor rather than realizing his own stated ambition during the 2020 campaign to become a “new FDR,” the Democratic president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, who in the 1930s decisively overturned the policies of his Republican predecessors.

      For the moment, Biden is showing no signs of listening to the needs of the populace beyond offering a quick fix of injected cash ($1,400). And, apart from the symbolic move of rejoining the 2015 Paris climate accord, Biden has maintained nearly all of Trump’s foreign policy legacy, including refusing to cancel Trump’s sanctions on Iran that followed the US withdrawal from the nuclear agreement with the Iranians. A mere reduction of those sanctions might have modestly pointed toward a return to the status quo ante-Trump. In his various actions concerning China, Iran and Saudi Arabia and even Venezuela, Biden appears to be paying homage to Trump’s leadership rather than blazing a new path in international diplomacy.

      In a famous moment during a vice-presidential debate in 1988, Democrat Lloyd Bentsen cut his young opponent, Dan Quayle, down to size with a remark that followed Quayle’s attempt to compare himself to President John F. Kennedy. Bentsen reminded Quayle that he had served under the assassinated president before concluding, “Senator, you’re no Jack Kennedy.” Bentsen was a child of 12 when Roosevelt began the first of his four terms as president. If he were alive today, Bentsen might have the gall to say to Biden: You’re no FDR.

      *[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

      Influence Has Become Democracy’s Influenza

      by

      Two months after the departure of Donald Trump, the world is seeking to understand the contours of the new administration’s still hesitating foreign policy. US President Joe Biden made a bold step forward this week when he vowed to pursue the fantasy of Russiagate, the Democratic equivalent of QAnon. He may fear that without the Russian bugbear, MSNBC, the news channel that contributed so effectively to his election, will see its audience plummet even further than in the weeks since the inauguration. Russiagate alone kept MSNBC’s audience hooked through four years of Donald Trump.

      CNBC delves into the private thoughts of a president who now apparently feels empowered to judge the moral status of other leaders: “President Joe Biden says he believes Russian leader Vladimir Putin is a killer with no soul.” Biden intends to make the Russian president “pay a price” for interfering in the 2020 US election.

      A Deeper Look into Hong Kong’s Evolution

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      Biden’s remarks followed a report issued by US intelligence that included the following observation: “A key element of Moscow’s strategy this election cycle was its use of people linked to Russian intelligence to launder influence narratives including — misleading or unsubstantiated allegations against President Biden — through US media organizations, US officials, and prominent US individuals, some of whom were close to former President Trump and his administration.”

      One may forgive the incoherence of the author’s punctuation, but no reasonable reader can fail to deplore the confusion of the charges, highlighted by the use of phrases such as “people linked to” and “some of whom.” And then there is the semantic enormity of the phrase, “launder influence narratives.”

      Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:

      Influence narrative:

      Anything any politician or diplomat of any nation happens to utter in speech or writing. The basis of all political discourse.

      Contextual Note

      In his book, “The Ultimate Goal,” former Indian spy chief Vikram Sood explores the way governments and their intelligence arms build and promote their self-interested narratives. Like a modern Machiavelli, Sood offers today’s princes the basic recipe: “Manage narratives to manage your destiny … tell your story first, any other story thereafter will only be a reaction.” That sums up the business of the CIA. The fact that US intelligence operatives want people to feel shocked that Russia might be using “influence narratives” reveals more about the CIA and its belief in the naivety of the US public than it does about Russia. The report itself is a perfect example of an “influence narrative.”

      Covering the same topic for The Washington Post, Ellen Nakashima confusingly repeats the CIA’s metaphor of laundering when she cites the report’s claim that Russians used “Ukrainians linked to Russian intelligence to ‘launder’ unsubstantiated allegations against Biden through U.S. media, lawmakers and prominent individuals.” “Launder,” in this context, is clearly a metaphor in spy language borrowed from the idea of “money laundering,” the act of pushing dirty money through indirect channels to return to the economy with a clean appearance. 

      Embed from Getty Images

      It may seem odd to apply a metaphor borrowed from the banking world and apply it to the hyperreal field of political narrative. But given the intelligence community’s well-documented predilection for dirty information — otherwise known as lies — it should hardly surprise us that the masters of plots and subplots see the public narrative as something that needs to be laundered. Sood, after all, tells us that the political language in any official narrative “is designed to make lies sound truthful and to give an appearance of solidity to the pure wind.”

      Since the idea of “laundered narrative” belongs specifically to spy vocabulary, it may seem disconcerting that Washington Post journalists have uncritically adopted the term and feel no need to explain what it means. Could it be that they are corrupted by their incestuous relations with the spymasters in Langley, Virginia, who feed them much of their most valuable content and which they reprint uncritically? In contrast with The Post, Al Jazeera took the liberty of substituting a different verb, writing: “Moscow sought to ‘push influence narratives’ that included misleading or unsubstantiated claims.” 

      “Launder” has become part of The Post’s standard vocabulary. In September 2020, during the presidential election campaign, Post columnist Josh Rogin had used the term concerning the same claims about Moscow’s interference. According to Rogin, Democratic leaders demanded “a briefing based on concerns that members of Congress were being used to launder information as part of a foreign interference operation.”

      This pushes the accusation a little further by supposing that the members of Congress referred to were actively involved in making the dirty information look clean. But that’s exactly how the fabricated Russiagate narrative is designed to play out: Putin’s accomplices and useful idiots can be found under every table. Just like in the good ol’ days of Joe McCarthy. After all, if the narrative tells us there’s a threat, we really do need to feel threatened. That’s the CIA and the media doing their job. Who doesn’t remember all the al-Qaeda sleeper cells that populated every American city following 9/11?

      Historical Note

      The website Strategic Culture offers a succinct explanation of the CIA’s Operation Mockingbird that permitted it to infiltrate domestic media in the US. The journalist, Wayne Madsen, writes: “A major focus of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency from its very inception was the penetration of the news media, including the assignment of CIA agents to the newsrooms and editorial offices of America’s largest media operations, including The Washington Post, The New York Times, Hearst Newspaper, NBC News, ABC News, CBS News, and other major newspapers and broadcast networks.” That has been ever since one of the harder components of US soft power.

      This week, Matt Taibbi interviewed the famous whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, who, in 1971, leaked the Pentagon Papers to The New York Times, exposing the embarrassing truth about the war in Vietnam that had been carefully hidden from the media. Taibbi recounts how “Ellsberg described a vicious cycle, in which leaders lie pervasively, then learn to have so much contempt for the public that swallows those lies, that they feel justified in lying more.”

      In its own dissemination of the content of the intel report released this week, The New York Times admits that the “report did not explain how the intelligence community had reached its conclusions about Russian operations during the 2020 election.” The report itself explains: “The Intelligence Community rarely can publicly reveal the full extent of its knowledge or the specific information on which it bases its analytic conclusions, as doing so could endanger sensitive sources and methods.” In other words, don’t ask for evidence, you won’t get it. Glenn Greenwald reminds his readers that when, last October, the story broke concerning Hunter Biden’s laptop that intel attributed to Moscow’s meddling, the FBI had already “acknowledged that it had not found any Russian disinformation on the laptop.”

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      When the same discredited story reappeared months later with no significant changes and still with zero evidence, instead of casting doubt on the entire story, the obedient media interpreted it as confirmation of the original narrative. What better illustration of Vikram Sood’s principle, “tell your story first, any other story thereafter will only be a reaction”?

      Perhaps the most neglected dimension of this debate concerns the official role of intelligence. A month after John F. Kennedy’s assassination in 1963, former President Harry Truman complained in an op-ed for The Washington Post that the CIA — an agency he had created — had betrayed its straightforward mission of gathering information to clarify the president in his decision-making. Truman insisted that “the most important thing was to guard against the chance of intelligence being used to influence or to lead the President into unwise decisions.” When Operation Mockingbird under the direction of Cord Meyer was launched during Dwight Eisenhower’s presidency, the CIA had not only begun focusing on influencing the president, it realized that the best way of influencing executive decisions was to control the narrative that the media would share with the public.

      The result is visible today, though no public figure will admit it. Democracy itself is engulfed within an elaborate system coordinated between the intelligence community, vested interests and the commercial media that generates and disseminates an endless stream of influence narratives.

      *[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

      Is the US Back Under Biden?

      by

      Caligula was by all accounts a nasty piece of work. During the nearly four years that he ruled over the Roman Empire in the first century CE, Caligula was notorious for sexual predation and extravagant spending. Never one to sell himself short, he proclaimed early on that he was a god. He held the Senate in such contempt that he forced its high-ranking members to run alongside his chariot for miles dressed in their togas. He dismissed Virgil as a hack writer and Livy as a dispenser of fake history, and he dreamed of making his favorite horse a consul.

      He was also inordinately fond of killing people, sometimes only to seize their assets. Or because he was bored, like the time at a gladiatorial contest when there were no criminals to execute during the intermission. Thinking fast, the despot ordered his guards to throw an entire section of the audience into the arena to be devoured by wild animals.

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      The world’s most powerful empire suffered four years of unbounded narcissism from a man with a reputation for sexual assaults and a fondness for cruelty who disparaged everyone in sight. Sound familiar?

      The one member of his close circle whose life Caligula spared was his uncle Claudius, primarily to make fun of the older man, who was lame and stammered. But “Sleepy Claudius,” particularly as depicted in the two historical novels of Robert Graves and portrayed by Derek Jacobi in the hit BBC series, was a crafty fellow who knew how to survive the deadly game of Roman imperial politics. When the Praetorian Guard finally had enough of Caligula and assassinated him — with the support of the political elite — Claudius was found hiding behind the curtains in the palace and proclaimed the new emperor.

      Claudius went on to rule for 13 years. Despite being absent-minded and scatter-brained, he proved to be far more capable than most Romans anticipated. The new emperor restored the rule of law throughout the empire. He stabilized the economy, embarked on an ambitious plan to improve the infrastructure of the realm, and even expanded its reach in the Balkans, North Africa and far-off Britain.

      Joe Biden, similarly underestimated because of his stammer and meandering speeches, has channeled Claudius in his first month in office. With a flurry of executive orders, the new US president has quickly reversed some of the most damaging policies of his deranged predecessor. Facing both a pandemic and an economic crisis, he is restoring confidence in government with a rapid vaccination rollout and a large-scale stimulus package. He has plans for big policy initiatives around infrastructure, energy and immigration.

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      But, of course, not everyone was thrilled with Emperor Claudius, particularly those on the Roman periphery. The British, for instance, chafed under imperial rule. Their escalating anger culminated in the bloody but ultimately unsuccessful revolt of Queen Boudica in 60 CE. Not surprisingly, Biden too has faced his share of criticism, particularly among those on the receiving end of American power or those who’ve bristled at the fickleness of American leadership.

      America’s Caligula is still around, perhaps even harboring hopes of a return to power in 2024. In the meantime, what are we to make of America’s Claudius and his effort to bring stability to the American empire?

      Biden Makes Nice with the World

      The Biden administration has gone into overdrive in its efforts to rejoin the international community as a member in good standing. On February 19, the United States officially reentered the 2015 Paris climate agreement, while Special Envoy John Kerry has pledged to restore the $2 billion for the Green Climate Fund that the US promised under Barack Obama but never delivered. The administration has rejoined the World Health Organization, signed up for the COVID-19 Vaccines Global Access (COVAX) program and promised to disburse the $4 billion that Congress appropriated for COVAX at the end of 2020. Biden reversed some of former President Donald Trump’s most noxious immigration policies, shutting down construction of the wall on the southern border, ending the “Muslim travel ban” and beginning to bring the country back into compliance with international norms around refugees and asylum-seekers.

      The Biden administration has also pledged more cooperative relations with NATO allies, Pacific partners and democratic countries more generally. It rejoined the UN Human Rights Council as an observer and restored funding for the UN Population Fund. It began the process of reviving the Iran nuclear deal, restarted relations with Palestinian organizations, embarked tentatively on restoring better relations with Cuba, extended New START with Russia and stopped funding the Saudi-led war in Yemen. Not bad for one month’s work.

      President Biden’s moves have encountered inevitable challenges, both domestic and foreign. The Senate, as I explained in my last column, has been perhaps the major check in American politics on an authentic internationalism. Not surprisingly, some Republicans in the Senate are already trying to undermine US involvement in the Paris climate agreement, and they’re sharpening their knives to attack renewed engagement with Iran and with Cuba.

      Some allies, too, are not fully on board with Biden’s great reset. France would prefer to invest more in an independent European security system and rely less on NATO. Germany is not interested in a full-court press on Russia and hopes to strike a compromise with the Biden administration that would allow it to stay on schedule with its Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline deal with the Kremlin. Japan and South Korea are squeamish about the trilateral coordination that the United States is (again) promoting, relations with Turkey are tense and Israel is unhappy with Biden’s restoring US ties with Palestine.

      But the real problem with the president’s new approach to the world lies not in the resistance it has engendered at home or the ambivalence it has fostered abroad. It lies with the very nature of Biden’s foreign policy.

      The Stick

      The amount of damage that Trump did to the world was limited to a certain extent by his incompetence. He could have blundered into another war if his advisers had let the presidential id run wild. If he’d had a Stephen Miller to do to foreign policy what this savvy operator did to immigration, Trump might well have permanently damaged the global system.

      Embed from Getty Images

      Biden, meanwhile, has assembled a thoroughly competent team of professionals — from Secretary of State Antony Blinken and UN Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield to climate czar John Kerry and Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman. That competence is a godsend when it comes to navigating the intricacies of the Iran nuclear deal and the Paris climate negotiations.

      But when it comes to the less pleasant aspects of US foreign policy, that competence might prove deadly. Claudius, it turned out, was not a feeble dotard. He knew exactly how to deploy Rome’s imperial might to finish the job Caligula had started in conquering Mauritania and to extend the empire’s dominion to the westernmost reaches of Europe. If the Biden administration decides to ramp up confrontation with China in the South China Sea, for instance, his team might very competently — and disastrously — marshal US allies in the region to implement the plan.

      Pax Romana was largely an enforced peace rather than a negotiated one, and Pax Americana has always relied on the overwhelming predominance of US military power. Already, the Biden team has stated its desire to focus on great power rivalry with China and Russia rather than losing propositions like the war in Afghanistan. That preference will translate into a continuation of bloated military budgets, large arms deals with allies and sort-of allies on the periphery of China and Russia, and the deployment of various economic strategies like sanctions to influence the behavior of these perennial competitors.

      In his early days in office, Biden has been quick to emphasize the role of diplomacy, promising that force will be the “tool of last resort.” A dramatic example of that approach has been the absence of any drone strikes during the first month of the administration. This is in marked contrast to the strikes that Obama and Trump ordered almost immediately upon taking office as well as the escalation in attacks that took place in Trump’s final months. Only one airstrike has been reported, in Iraq on February 9 against the Islamic State. (Editor’s note: This article was written prior to the US airstrike in eastern Syria on February 25.) In addition to initiating a review of drone strikes, the administration has launched a probe into Special Forces operations to ascertain whether they have adhered to the Pentagon’s “law of war” requirements. This is all very promising. But will it last?

      Claudius was content to be successful within the Roman imperial framework. Guilty of his own excesses of violence, he never tried to turn the empire back into a republic or negotiate a new set of relations with Rome’s far-flung possessions. He knew only to expand. Biden, too, operates within the existing system of American dominance. It remains to be seen whether he will dramatically reduce the US military footprint and work with other major powers to redefine international relations at a time of multiple global crises.

      If he doesn’t, America will risk the same fate that befell Rome after the death of Claudius. In 54 CE, a new emperor took power who made Caligula look like a cub scout. This latest Caesar made sure that the good that Claudius did during his 13-year reign was indeed interred with his bones. “Nero practiced every kind of obscenity,” writes the gossipy chronicler Suetonius, adding that the new emperor “annulled many of Claudius’ decrees and edicts, on the grounds that he’d been a doddering old idiot.”

      The trick, then, is not just to reverse the evils of one’s predecessor but to make those reversals stick. That, in turn, will require not just quick fixes but turning the United States into a truly cooperative world power.

      *[This article was originally published by FPIF.]

      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

      Can Joe Biden Rewrite the Rules of the Road?

      by

      During his presidency, Donald Trump found a new way to keep the American public and its media alert. It was a kind of educational game called “Spot the Lie.” If the media had understood how the game worked, the nation and the world would have benefited. Instead, it tended to degenerate into a shouting match in which each side would shriek with increasing volume to express its indignation.

      What was special about his prevarication? It was systematic and provocative, attention-getting. Traditionally, US presidents lied quietly, covering their reprehensible acts in expressions of virtuous intentions. Even the most obvious lie of the 21st century — George W. Bush’s claim that Saddam Hussein was hiding a massive store of weapons of mass destruction — was presented as a concern for ensuring peace by preventing an imminent act of war by a mad Iraqi dictator. It turned out that both the madness and the capacity for war were on the American side. But nobody noticed because, well, the American military is by definition “a force for good.”

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      With the incoming Biden administration, there will be fewer obvious lies. Given President-elect Joe Biden’s limited rhetorical skills, there may even be moments when Americans have access to the true intentions of a government that ordinarily seeks to hide them.

      After the signature by 15 Asian nations of the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) last week, Biden explained what would be behind US strategy after he becomes president on January 20, 2021. “We make up 25% of the world’s trading capacity, of the economy of the world,” he said. “We need to be aligned with the other democracies, another 25% or more, so that we can set the rules of the road instead of having China and others dictate outcomes because they are the only game in town.”

      Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:

      Rules of the road:

      The prescription of behavior for a group of supposed equals that clearly favors the interests of one member of the group whose dominant status allows it to impose its values and preferred behaviors on other members of a group without having to consult an external authority or waste too much time negotiating among equals

      Contextual Note

      Leaders of hegemons rarely explicitly lay out their hegemonic agenda. No one could doubt the bold claim Biden has made about the “rules of the road.” The United States always seeks to set the rules rather than play by them. But his statement deviates from the truth when he compares the US attitude with China’s. When it’s about the US defining the rules, Biden uses the verb “set.” But when it’s China, he uses the verb “dictate.” After all, China is a communist dictatorship, so logically anything it does can be called dictating.

      That’s how clever diplomatic language works, at least in the hands of Democrats. They prefer to select the effective verb to instill the idea of good versus evil. Republicans prefer to use the language of moral judgment or downright insult. President Trump likes to call them purveyors of evil, “illegitimate” or even “shitholes.”

      Embed from Getty Images

      But the major difference between the rhetoric of the two parties is that the Republicans shy away from admitting the hard reality that results from the muscular use of power relationships. They prefer to present it as the logic of history, divine will or predestination that have put the US in the role of unique decision-maker for the rest of the world. The shining city on the hill spreads its light across the globe by virtue of being the shining city, not through its complex interplay with other nations. It has an existential quality that can no one can ever doubt.

      That is what Trump means by “America First.” He presented the slogan as if it turned around the idea that the US should decide to tend only to its own needs and not worry about what happens elsewhere in the world. But it also contained the idea that because America was “first” by virtue of its might, it produced the light that illuminated the rest of the world. It didn’t actually have to be good and fair to stand as a model for everything that was good and fair.

      The primary difference between these two interpretations of American exceptionalism lies in the respective rhetorical strategies rather than policy. That is why Biden’s foreign policy may not be very different from Trump’s in its overall effect on the rest of the world. It will be a variation on hegemonic rhetoric, but the military and financial base will be nearly identical. 

      Democrats believe that American exceptionalism, the success story of the nation, endows it with the authority to write the rules of the road for the rest of humanity. The Republicans see it as the result of writing the rules for themselves which they expect the rest of the world will naturally follow.

      Historical Note

      When, alluding to the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and the RCEP, Joe Biden compared the attitude of the US quite naturally seeking to “set the rules of the road” and the Chinese who “dictate outcomes.” The case can be made that he inverted the truth concerning the history of these two trade arrangements.

      When the TPP was still awaiting signature at the end of Barack Obama’s presidency, the BBC noted that the deal designed to put the US in the position to set the rules of the road was contested inside the US. The BBC reports: “US opponents have characterised the TPP as a secretive deal that favoured big business and other countries at the expense of American jobs and national sovereignty.” That highlights the problem Biden will be facing in many of his future decisions: how to define the US and its interests. In other words, who defines the rules? Is it big business or the American people?

      Commenting on the historical background of the “secretive deal,” Vox reported: “Negotiations over the TPP’s terms were conducted in secret, with well-connected interest groups having access to more information — and more opportunities to influence the process — than members of the general public.” Even Congress was refused full access to the terms of the draft.

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      In other words, when Biden refers to setting the rules of the road, it is anything but an openly negotiated procedure. In contrast, the RCEP was drafted conjointly and largely democratically by all the interested parties, which include some of the strongest allies of the US: Australia, Japan and South Korea. It is a lie of Trumpian proportions to suggest that the RCEP was dictated by the Chinese.

      Statements of that kind by the president-elect do not bode well for the future foreign policy we can expect from the Biden administration. Biden’s future secretary of state, Anthony Blinken, sounds refreshing when he more realistically characterizes the state of the world at a forum at the Hudson Institute in July: “Simply put, the big problems that we face as a country and as a planet, whether it’s climate change, whether it’s a pandemic, whether it’s the spread of bad weapons — to state the obvious, none of these have unilateral solutions. Even a country as powerful as the United States can’t handle them alone.” 

      Blinken’s approach to foreign policy is likely to be similar to Obama’s, which does indeed appear refreshing in comparison to Donald Trump’s. But it is likely to be a return to a certain form of wishing to write the rules alone, if not handling the problems alone. In an interview in July, Blinken regretted that, under Trump, the US had lost the ability to dictate the rules. “If we’re not doing a lot of that organizing in terms of shaping the rules and the norms and the institutions through which countries relate to one another,” he said, “then one of two things, either someone else is doing it and probably not in a way that advances our own interests and values or maybe just as bad, no one is and then you tend to have chaos and a vacuum that may be filled by bad things.”

      The problem Biden will face is that the world has changed. Unlike a few decades ago, few now believe the US has a divine right to “shape the rules” or the ability to stave off chaos.

      *[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